Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington in PHILADELPHIA 

Thursday, May 15-----The timing could not be more perfect. On the same day that the California Supreme Court issued a historic reversal against the ban on gay marriage, the Jacob Burns Film Center in New York's Westchester County is launching its annual Out At The Movie series, focusing on films made by and targed to the gay and lesbian community (and those who love and admire them).

Whatever one's position on the subject of gay marriage, the civil rights of gay couples is an issue that goes beyond the legal. It is a matter of dignity and decency. It is a testament to how far the United States still needs to go in this regard that the film chosen to lead off the series, which screens this evening, was the winner for Best Documentary Short Subject in this year's Oscar race.

FREEHELD follows the legal battle of Lt. Laurel Hester, a New Jersey police officer dying of cancer, as she desperately fights to transfer her pension to her domestic partner. After spending 25 years investigating crimes and protecting the rights of victims, Hester finds herself pitted against shockingly reactionary local officials. This bracing film was directed by Cynthia Wade, who will be present at the screening for a question-and-answer session.

The film series is mainly made up of documentaries, including such Festival favorites as FOR THE BIBLE TELLS ME SO (2007) by Daniel Karlake, which focuses on five religious Christian families— including that of former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt and Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson—who must learn to reconcile their fundamentalist religious beliefs with their love for their own gay or lesbian child; A JIHAD FOR LOVEA JIHAD FOR LOVE (2007) by Parvez Sharma, the first documentary exploring the coexistence of Islam and homosexuality, and the risk that Muslim gay men and women take when they are public about their personal lives; BLACK, WHITE & GRAY (2007) by James Crump, an intimate look at the relationship between celebrated and controversial photographer Robert Mapplethore and his much older patron and manager Sam Wagstaff; and CHRIS AND DON (2007) by Tina Mascara and Guido Santi, which chronicles the relationship between internationally famous author Christopher Isherwood and his much younger paramour Don Bachardy, two openly and unapologetically gay men in an era before it was common to be out.

(...)

Tuesday, May 13------Poland has had an active film industry since the beginning of the 20th century and continues to be one of the most active players on the Eastern European film scene. Having produced such acknowledged film masters as Roman Polanski, Andrzej Wajda, Agnieszka Holland, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Jan Lenica, Lech Majewski and Jerzy Skolimowski, the Polish film scene has flourished, even under the strict demands of 40 years of Communist rule. As the economic dynamo of the “new Europe” and host country to the world-renowned Lodz International Film School, a new generation of filmmakers is now emerging.

American audiences have an opportunity to discover these new talents-in-the-making at the New York Polish Film Festival, which runs from May 9 to 13 at the Anthology Film Archives, one of New York’s most committed film showcases. For the fourth time, the Festival is presenting a fascinating program featuring some of the most interesting, exciting and diverse feature, short and documentary films from Poland. 

One of the Festival’s highlights occurred on Sunday evening, with the premiere at the prestigious Museum of Modern Art of Katyn, the Oscar-nominated film by film master Andrzej Wajda. The film is a recreation of one of the most shocking incidents of World War II, when Soviet soldiers slaughtered thousands of Polish officers and citizens in the forests of Katyn. A story that could not be told during the Communist regime, Wajda brings all the drama of the incident and its aftermath in an impressive sweep of historical importance. The special screening was introduced by Dr. Annette Insdorf, Director of Undergraduate Film Studies at Columbia University and a noted writer and film critic who has written several books on films that chronicle the Holocaust. 

TricksAmong the festival's films are: Savior's Square by Krzysztof Krauze and Joanna Kos- Krauze, which won Best Picture honors at the Gdynia Film Festival; Immensity of Justice by  Wieslaw Saniewski; Jasminium by Jan Jakub Kolski; Extras by Michal Kwiecinski; Tricks by Andrzej Jakimowski, which won the Best Film prize at the Miami Film Festival; Time To Die by Dorota Kedzierzawska; Tomorrow We Are Going To The Movies, which won the Best Debut film prize at the Gdynia Film Festival; Preserve by  Lukasz Palkowski; and Summer Love by Piotr Uklanski, a Polish Western (imagine that) that had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. A short film or documentary accompanies each feature. 

Most of the Festival’s are award-winners in Poland and abroad but have never been seen in the United St (...)

Jean-Luc Godard 

Wednesday, May 7-------This May marks a milestone in recent world history. It is the 40th anniversary of the “events of 1968”, a series of revolutionary protests that spanned the globe and created social and political turmoil, particularly in the United States, England and France. While the protests centered on the escalating war in Vietnam, the main engine was a discontent with politics as usual. In France, in particular, art mixed with politics, as leading filmmakers, artists and philosophers led the charge and envisioned a proletarian state where artists, students, workers and intellectuals would fight side by side for basic human rights. The protests even reached into the vaulted ceremony of the Cannes Film Festival, stopping the proceedings for the first and only time in the Festival’s sixty plus year history. With Cannes starting up again next week, the timing is perfect for a look backwards.

One of the key “artistic agitators” of the period was the director Jean-Luc Godard, whose prolific films of the decade were the most accurate depiction of both the promise and the doomed fatalism of the period. To mark the “events of 1968”, the Film Forum, New York’s most progressive arthouse complex, is screening a milestone five-week program devoted to Jean-Luc Godard, which began this past weekend with Godard’s breakthrough film, Breathless, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg.

Godard famously said of the films of this period that they “should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” That anarchic attitude is reflected in most of his films of the decade. Throughout the 1960s, cinephiles eagerly awaited the latest film — or two— by thedirector, a founding father of the French Nouvelle Vague. The former film critic for Cahiers du Cinema was the most innovative and prolific of his contemporaries, with each new work seemingly rewriting the grammar of film. Jump cuts, asynchronous soundtracks, self-narration, cinema as essay, cinema as collage, self-referential cinema, cinema of anarchy — you name it, Godard’s 60s oeuvre redefined “cutting edge” — and, with location and available-light shooting, now provides a near-documentary time capsule of Paris in those years.

Godard spawned a new kind of movie star, as well, with such New Wave icons as Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg, and Anna Karina, the latter doubling as the director’s muse through seven film collaborations and a rocky four-year marriage. Forty years after the tumultuous events of May ’68, one can almost see the chaos coming through the satire and social criticism in Godard’s chronicles of “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” For this pivotal decade, (...)

 THE PAPER WILL BE BLUE

Tuesday, April 22----In the world of cinema, there is always a “new wave” occurring in a country or region or even genre. No question, in 2007/2008, that new wave is centered in the country of Romania, which has flexed its muscles on the international stage with a series of lauded films. At last year’s Cannes Film Festival, the Romanian abortion drama 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS AND 2 DAYS by Cristian Mingui was the surprise winner of the Palme d’Or, the Festival’s highest honor. Another Romanian film 12:08 OF BUCHAREST by Corneliu Porumboiu also won a prize at Cannes and has since become an international arthouse cult favorite. Earlier in the year, the naturalistic THE DEATH OF MR. LAZARESCU by Cristi Puiu showed on many film critics “top ten” lists. 

For those who think that this Romanian renaissance is some kind of new phenomenon, the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York (which sponsors both the New York Film Festival in the Fall and the recently concluded New Directors/New Films series) is presenting a survey of Romanian cinema of the 1960s through the 1980s, a dark period before the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship, when Romania was one of the most closed societies in the world. For “Shining Through A Long, Dark Night: Romanian Cinema, Then And Now”, which runs from April 16 to 27 at the Walter Reade Theater, the series presents 18 films, most of which have never been seen in North America before.

Probably the best known film in the series is FOREST OF THE HANGED, directed by Liviu Ciulei, who won the Best Director Prize at Cannes in 1965. Set during World War I, as the Romanian and Austro-Hungarian armies battle for control of Transylvania, the film tells the story of a young Romanian lieutenant who becomes a conscientious objector in the midst of battle. The film mixes epic-scale battle scenes with bold surrealistic touches in a stunningly shot panorama of black and white Cinemascope.

Also from 1965, when Eastern European was experiencing cultural thaws in neighboring Czechoslovakia and Hungary as well, is the non-linear narrative SUNDAY AT SIX by debut director Lucian Pintilie. The film, set in the late 1940s, when the Communist Party was consolidating its power, presents an unlikely romance between two Communist revolutionaries who find their mutual affection at odds with their party orthodoxy. This clash between the personal and the institution is one of the themes explored in many of these films, which were financed and controlled by the state film machine.

Films from the 1980s, including Iosif Demian’s A GIRL IN TEARS (1980), which uses both professional and non-professional actors to retrace an unsolved murder of a young woman and Dan Pita’s THE CONTEST (1982), which mixes harsh realism with allegory, use cinematic symbols of discontent or unease to offer a “between the lines” criticism of the Communist regime and the passive acceptance of totalitarianism that marked this generation of Rom (...)

WATER LILIES 

Thursday, April 3-------New Directors/New Films,  one of New York’s film world rites of Spring, is now mid-way through its program. Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, New Directors/New Films has earned an international reputation for its cutting-edge programming and commitment to more artistically ambitious filmmaking.

This year, a total of 26 features and 6 short films made the cut, spotlighting first and second-time directors who are beginning to make their mark on the international film world. This year, European films and co-productions make up 10 of the 26 features, among the strongest showing of European talents in the Festival’s 37 year history.

In a city which is open about its embrace of all things French, it is no surprise that France is the country most represented in the Festival mix. The two purely French productions include WATER LILIES, by director Celine Sciamma and LA FRANCE by Serge Bozon. WATER LILIES,.which won the Prix Louis Delluc as Best First Feature and was nominated for several Cesar Awards, tells the intriguing story of three young women who form a murky bond of desire and emotional violence during a sultry summer in the Paris suburbs. LA FRANCE is a historical epic with musical interludes set in the waning days of World War I. The film, which stars the sultry Sylvie Testud as a woman who disguises herself as a man to find her husband on the frontlines, won for its director the Prix Jean Vigo. 

France is represented in several co-productions as well at this year’s Festival. In JELLYFISH, co-directors Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen offer a fresh exploration of life in contemporary Tel Aviv. The film won the pretigious Camera d’Or prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival for best debut feature. In A LOST MAN, a French co-production with Lebanon, director Danielle Arbid explores sexual taboos in the Arab world in a story of an encounter of a French photographer with a Lebanese man who can’t remember his past. France is one of three co-producers with Spain and Argentina in the provocative XXY by Lucia Puenzo. The film tells the intriguing tale of a hermaphrodite raised as a girl who must now decide on whether she wants to live as a man or a woman. The film has been a major hit on the international film festival circuit, having won Best Film prizes at the Cannes Critics Week, Bangkok, Athens and Montreal film festivals, as well as a Best Director prize for Lucia Puenzo at the Edinburgh Film Festival. In EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY, director Michelange Quay brings considerable gifts to his debut feature set in his native Haiti. Vibrant musical sequences give way to contemplative tableaux of sexual ambiguity and colonial politics in this unique film debut.  

Two new films from Greece make a surprising showing at this year’s Festival, pointing to the vitality of this lesser known cinema of southern Europe. In CORRECTION by Thanos Anastopoulos, a young man just released from prison wanders the streets of Athens and becomes fascinated by a woman and her daughter. This affecting story of inner and national identity won the Best Screenplay Award at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival. In the (...)

DIMINISHED CAPACITY 

Wednesday, April 2------One film/one party…..it’s a formula that has served the Gen Art Film Festival well during the last dozen years. Well, the film + party theme kicks off again this evening, as the 13th Annual Gen Art Film Festival begins a week-long showcase of the best of new American independent cinema. The Festival, presented by Acura, offers spotlight showcases seven features and seven shorts from emerging filmmakers, which are followed by seven premiere parties at some of New York’s trendiest restaurants and nightclubs. This is one film event that allows film buffs to experience a movie premiere like a true insider. In its way, the Festival is like an interactive experience, allowing filmmakers, media, and the audience to share in the excitement.  The premiere parties will be held at exclusive NYC nightspots including The Bowery Hotel, Kiss & Fly, Pink Elephant, Prime, The Park, Touch, and Spotlight Live.

“Movies are a social experience”, Gen Art Film Festival Director and Film Division Vice President Jeff Abramson told me in an interview (more from Jeff in a detailed interview later this week). “We accentuate that social element by having film lovers meet for one showcase screening and then invite all audience members to join us for an exclusive party at a hot spot that they may not even know. Since we only show seven films, one per night, the spotlight is directed on the film and filmmakers, and the audience is there for a big party.” The Festival brings to New York premieres of films that have had their first exposure at Sundance, Slamdance, South By Southwest and Toronto. “Our audiences are of a certain mind set”, Abramson explained. “We can really take chances with our programming to stress works that are wildly individual and creative, which is what our audience appreciates and savors.”

While finding creative threads in this year’s program is perhaps best left to individual experience, the films selected have a common theme of over-coming adversity and finding inner peace in a complicated world. Festivities begin this evening at the Ziegfeld Theater, the preeminent single-screen movie palace still standing in New York, with DIMINISHED CAPACITY, directed by Terry Kinney. This delightful, bittersweet comedy about two men struggling with memory loss toplines Matthew Broderick and Alan Alda, who are both expected to attend tonight’s premiere. The Festival closes on April 8 with THE TAKE, which features a fierce performance by indie fave John Leguizamo as a family man who is thrown into a violent situation and must find the balance between morality and revenge. The film, directed by Brad Furman, also stars Tyrese Gibson, Bobby Cannavale and Rosie Perez. Following the Opening Night, films will be screened at the Visual Arts Theater, formerly the Chelsea West on West 23 Street, which was recently acquired by the School of Visual Arts.

The eclectic mix of dramatic features and documentaries includes a rare World Premiere. NIGHTLIFE, directed by Tim Sanderson, is a post-modern take on the classic vampire tale. In this mockumentary comedy, a small film crews follows six of the undead in their (...)

FROZEN RIVER Opens ND/NF 

Wednesday, March 26----As another sign of seasonal change, the venerable New Directors/New Films festival returns to the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center in what is one of New York’s rites of Spring. Dedicated to the discovery and support of emerging artists, ND/NF has earned an international reputation for its cutting-edge programming and commitment to more artistically ambitious filmmaking.

This year, a total of 26 features and 6 short films made the cut, spotlighting first and second-time directors who are beginning to make their market on the international film world.  While ND/NF has always been a supportive home for American independent filmmakers over its 37 year history, this year’s Festival has dedicated 9 feature films (one-third of the program) to new works from emerging indie auteurs. The Festival will open this evening with what is sure to be one of the most talked about films of the season. FROZEN RIVER, a debut feature by director Courtney Hunt that won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, is a classic indie in style and content. Two women in upstate New York—one recently left with two sons to raise, the other a widow on the Mohawk reservation straddling the U.S./Canadian border—need money fast, and they become unlikely partners in a perilous and illegal enterprise. The two leads, Melissa Leo and Misty Upham give exquisite and vulnerable performances in a film that builds in power as the twists of the story unfold.

Other Sundance titles making their East Coast Premieres include: BALLAST (Lance Hammer), a heart-wrenching human drama about an African-American family in the depressed Mississippi Delta region; MOMMA’S MAN (Azazel Jacobs), a tour-de-force mix of drama and documentary that chronicles the filmmaker’s own story as a man who finds himself unable to leave his childhood home in his parents’ bohemian loft; SLEEP DEALER (Alex Rivera), winner of the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize, is a masterfully intricate and intriguing mystery set in a near-future, militarized world marked by closed borders, virtual labor and a global digital network that joins minds and experiences; SLINGSHOT HIP HOP (Jackie Reem Salloum), an uplifting documentary that showcases the voice of a new generation, as Palestinian rappers form alternative voices of resistance within the Israeli-Palestinian struggle; and TROUBLE THE WATER (Tia Lessin and Carl Deal), an audience pleaser about an aspiring rap artist and her streetwise husband, armed with a video camera, who  show the world what survival is all about when they are trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters.

Other American indie titles (and co-productions) include MUNYURANGABO (Lee Isaac Chung), an absorbing drama about an orphan of the Rwandan genocide, who travels from Kigali to the countryside on a quest for justice; MOVING MIDWAY (Godfrey Cheshire), the feature debut of the acclaimed New York film critic, this moving documentary chronicles the filmmaker’s search for his family roots in North Carolina, unearthing often painful reminders of the past and a host of truly quirk (...)

Ellen Page in THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS 

Wednesday, March 19------In a bitter twist of irony, Americans know far more about the film culture of Europe and Asia than they do about their neighbor to the north. Canadian cinema, which has flourished for decades, makes an occasional dent in the United States in an unfair balance of trade that sees American films flooding the Canadian market (as they do everywhere else in the world).

Well, for the past week, the Museum of Modern Art has attempted to redress this imbalance with their lively program CANADIAN FRONT 2008. The series present eight new Canadian feature titles that have been making waves on the international film festival circuit and are now coming to New York with a good head of steam. The series includes a mix of films from established names such as Denys Arcand and Bruce McDonald, as a well as a host of exciting new talents.

The series kicked off last week with the New York Premiere of POOR BOY’S GAME,, an engrossing melodrama about boxing from Nova Scotia, with great star turns by Danny Glover and Rossif Sutherland (the son of Donald Sutherland and half-brother of Kiefer Sutherland). The film delves into the lives and communities of two families who have been affected in very different ways by a brutal incident that happened years before. The film is also being given a special run under the MoMA Presents banner, which features films that will be screened for a week, giving MoMA audiences an extended opportunity to catch these significant works.

The series of eight films is distinguished by some memorable and powerful performances. Tom Cavanagh (of the ABC series ED) is pitch-perfect in BREAKFAST WITH SCOT by director Laurie Lynd. In this comedic satire, Cavanagh plays a gay NHL sports announcer. The film, which has been officially sanctioned by the NHL and the Toronto Maple Leafs, subverts traditional notions of masculinity and marks the first time that a professional sports franchise has allowed its logo and uniforms to be used in a gay-themed story.

Veteran Quebec actor Marc Labrèche gives a stand-out performance as a Walter Mitty-like civil servant, who resorts to daydreams in a bureaucracy gone made, in Oscar-winning director Denys Arcand’s dark comedy DAYS OF DARKNESS, which closed the Cannes Film Festival this year. The film concludes the director’s Quebec Trilogy, which included the acclaimed THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE (1986) and THE BARBARIAN INVASIONS (2003).

Oscar nominee Ellen Page (JUNO) gives another warm and quirky performance in  iconoclastic director Bruce McDonald’s innovative THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS. Utilizing split-screen techniques and multiple images on screen, the director presents a   grim, fractured portrait of a misunderstood teenager shouldering th (...)

Claude Miller's UN SECRET (A SECRET) 

Friday, January 11-------With the explosion of film festivals over the past two decades, no specialized genre has been more potent, and had more loyal audiences, than the Jewish film festival, which has become a cultural staple in communities across North America, Europe and South America. In all, there may be almost 300 of these events in a given year.....each a mix of film appreciation and something more fundamental, an opportunity for the Jewish community (and those involved with them) to sample an international mix of fiction, documentaries, short subject and even animation that speak to and of the Jewish soul.

One of the oldest, and certainly the most prestigious, of these film events has launched this past week in New York City, home to the largest population of Jews outside of Israel. The New York Jewish Film Festival (NYJFF) is a bellweather showcase for world cinema that investigates, records, and celebrates the Jewish experience. Founded in 1992, the annual Festival is a collaboration between The Jewish Museum and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. This year, a total of 32 shorts, dramas, and documentaries from Germany, Hungary, France, Argentina, Russia, the US, Mexico, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, and Austria add up to an exhilarating worldwide journey. To mark the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, this year’s festival showcases ten new Israeli films. And finally, there is the festival-within-the-festival, a four ftitle mini-retrospective of the films by the late Austrian stage, television, and film director Axel Corti.

Among this year's highlights:

--The US Premiere of A SECRET, the semi-autobiographical film by French auteur Claude Miller, which shared the Grand Prix des Ameriques at the Montreal World Film Festival this year. In postwar Paris, a young boy discovers the tragic consequences of his parents’ mutual attraction during the Nazi occupation. Claude Miller portrays a family consumed with guilt, jealousy, fear and loss in seemingly idyllic rural and urban landscapes. The cast features some of today’s most celebrated French actors including Cécile de France, Mathieu Amalric, Patrick Bruel, Julie Depardieu and Ludivine Sagnier.

--The NY Premiere of TEHILIM by Israeli director Raphael Nadjari. In this riveting and enigmatic drama selected for competition at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, a father inexplicably vanishes in Jerusalem. Unable to mourn, his secular wife retreats into silence while the Orthodox family members gather to recite Psalms (tehilim). With the best of intentions, the sons try to bring their father back through an improvised ritual.

--The NY Premiere of ORTHODOX STANCE from American director Jason Hutt. In this inspirational story, a 20-something Russian immigrant is improbably equally devoted to the seemingly disparate worlds of professional boxing and Orthodox Judaism. The film follows the box (...)

 CABARET BALKAN

Wednesday, January 9-------The cinema of Eastern Europe is one of the world’s most complex and rewarding for filmgoers willing to take the journey into the hearts and minds of its singular film artists. Among the most idiosyncratic of these talents is Goran Paskaljevic, one of Europe’s most respected and critically acclaimed directors. While New York audiences may have caught a few of this iconoclastic director’s choice films at film festivals over the years, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is offering the first major North American survey of the visually arresting and intellectually challenging work of this modern cinema master. Beginning tonight  and running through the month, MoMA will present a total of 13 features and two short films, all in new 35mm prints, at the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. The director himself will attend a special screening of his debut film BEACH GUARD IN WINTER (1976) on the series’ opening night.

Paskaljevic, who turns 60 this year, was born in 1947 in the Serbian capital of Belgrade. His father had founded the Belgrade Cinematheque, so the young film enthusiast was educated by the films he saw from film masters from Europe, the US and Asia. When he reached the age of 20, he studied cinema at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts), the celebrated film academy in Prague, during the brief, heady period “summer of liberalization”. He returned to his native Yugoslavia in 1973, following the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, to begin a celebrated career by making short films and documentaries for television.

His debut feature, BEACH GUARD IN WINTER (1976), about a young man’s journey to adulthood, marked by the fai