Portland International Film Festival Preview day 2: THE FIRST BEAUTIFUL THING & INCENDIES

Tuesday's press screenings paired two features involving adult children dwelling on the past history of their mothers.  Despite sharing interests in maternal themes, the films were strikingly different in tone.

The first film of the day came in the form of a sweet Italian melodrama.  Paolo Virzi's The First Beautiful Thing is a highly formal romp through the distant and messy past of a now much older and recently hospitalized woman.  Her son Bruno, a once promising poet turned teacher, has fallen into depression, drugs and drink, blaming his failures on painful memories of an unhappy childhood.  When the news of his mother's hospitalization brings him to her hospital bedside, he is forced to confront both the circumstances of his upbringing and the present state of his mother's health.
 

Refreshingly, the film doesn't try to exonerate the mother for either her poor parenting skills or the endless parade of unscrupulous men in whose beds she fell.  Bruno's remembrances of what he and his sister had to endure while in their mother's care are treated as objective renderings of their living conditions at the time.  These memories review and inspire some rather hilarious sequences in both the past and the present, such as when Bruno confesses being overcome by a feeling of emptiness and then attempts to fill it by ransacking his mother's home for any available intoxicants.

Overall, though, the film felt like a rather rote, by-the-numbers production, simply giving us what we've come to expect from this lighthearted genre of Italian film.  Everything is exceptionally pretty but none of the characterizations carry much weight--and that goes double for the predictable manner in which the story unfolds.  I left this early screening feeling more catered to than challenged, which is quite the opposite of why I usually go to the movies.  Still, I'm positive that many people will be amply satisfied by this meal.

The First Beautiful Thing plays at 8:45pm on Feb. 11th at the Broadway Theater.  There will be additional showings at the Broadway on Feb. 13th at 7:30pm and Feb. 16th at 6pm.

Next up was Incendies from Canada, the Academy Award-nominated film by director Denis Villeneuve (Maelstrom).

When Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal) dies, she leaves behind a will that stipulates that her children can only mark her grave if they carry out one last task for their mother's sake.  The mission involves the delivery of two sealed envelopes--one to a brother they never knew existed and another to the father they assumed was dead--in present day Lebanon.  The story deftly intertwines this journey with a harrowing retelling of their mother's life during the civil war of the 1970s

This is big, (capital "I") important storytelling that often teeters towards excess, without fully tumbling into the abyss of the sensationalistic.  Given what the final 15 minutes of the film hold for the viewer, this is quite a feat indeed.

Incendies plays at 8:30pm on Feb. 11th at the Whitsell Auditorium.  There will be an additional showing at the Broadway Theater at 4:15pm on Feb. 13th.

Portland International Film Festival preview day 1: SILENT SOULS and KAWASAKI'S ROSE

Monday marked the beginning of press screenings for this year's Portland International Film Festival (PIFF). Two movies a day, five days a week for three weeks equals a lot of films to talk about, so I'll probably only have time to touch on each one lightly before rushing off to check out the next set of screenings each day.

Things fall apart, it’s inevitable.  Our bodies, minds and even our culture are all positioned on a path that leads towards dissolution.  Silent Souls, the new film by Russian director Aleksei Fedorchenko, explores this base fact in a mode typical of Russian cinema, by which I mean that the film is bleak in subject, slow moving and comes off as somewhat emotionally neutral when compared to films we see being produced in the west.  It’s also a visually stunning movie that allows ample time to be fully drawn into the world being depicted.

Silent Souls tells the story of two men, Aist and Miron, on a mission to lie to rest the body of Miron’s wife.  Both men are descendants of the Merjan (or Meryan) people, whose culture was long ago absorbed into the larger Russian society.  Fedorchenko presents the disappearance of their culture and its accompanying rituals as a lens through which we can view the more direct and personal loss felt by these characters, slowly revealing the intersections between these parallel experiences.

Silent Souls is definitely one to catch at the festival, especially if you're a fan of visually rich, Russian cinema. I adored this film.

Silent Souls plays at 6:15pm on Feb. 11th at the Broadway Theater. A second screening is scheduled for 4:45pm on Feb. 13th at the Whitsell Auditorium.

The second film of the day was Kawasaki's Rose (dir. Jan Hrebejk), hailing from the Czech Republic. The story: A well-respected psychiatrist, Pavel, is about be honored for his work before, during and after the Velvet Revolution. The conflict? Well, it turns out that the doctor has a much darker past than most of his family ever imagined. Kawasaki's Rose is a solid film but it does spend a bit too much of its run time establishing characters on the periphery of the central narrative, eventually picking up a great deal of steam as it goes along.  And some of those supporting performances, Antonin Kratochvil's turn as the sculptor Borek, in particular, make it worth catching if you're planning on seeing a wide swath of the programming at this year's festival.

 

Kawasaki's Rose plays at 6pm on Feb. 11th at the Whitsell Auditorium. Additional screenings at the Broadway Theater are at 3:30pm on Feb. 13th and 6:45pm on Feb. 14th.

DOGTOOTH: Not for the weak of heart

The critically acclaimed (and Academy Award nominated) Greek film Dogtooth was finally released on dvd in the U.S. this past Tuesday.  The basic premise of the film involves an aging couple who have raised their children to fear that which lies outside the gates of their home.  Playing out like some kind of Freudian nightmare sporting a wink and a twisted grin, Dogtooth fashions a world that is fully enclosed within the repressed fantasies and regressed understandings of those now adult offspring.  As the film unfolds, those characters play an endless series of nonsensical games which only partially discharge the sexual friction that grows between them.  And every once in a while, when the safety imposed upon them by their parents is challenged, the father punishes the offender brutally.

Dogtooth resides in the same darkly tense terrain as films like Todd Solondz' Happiness and Michael Haneke's Funny Games.  Like those past films, it provokes without moralizing, interrogates without resolution and leaves the heavy lifting of interpreting the thematics almost entirely to the audience.  With its primary meaning not at all locked down, a post-screening discussion of Dogtooth is likely to produce just as many interpretations as there are audience members in attendance.  My own reading of the film vacillates somewhere between a fairly standard critique of the family and/or the socialization process as it starts at birth and continues until death.  Yeah, folks...it's just that wide open.

A warning: the film is not for the overly squeamish.  There are some truly shocking moments peppered throughout its run time.  It's plenty disturbing but also funny, engaging and completely original in its approach.

 

One last note: as a bonus feature, the Kino released dvd has an excellent 12 minute interview with director Yorgos Lanthimos on the production, casting and his overall filmmaking philosophy.  Very much worth checking out.

ALIEN BOY needs your help

Alien Boy: The Death & Life of James Chasse is the new film by Portland documentary filmmaker Brian Lindstrom.  Brian's been at the doc game for quite some time now and maybe you've heard of or seen his last full-length project, Finding Normal:

According to the official website for the film, Alien Boy examines how:

In September 2006 James Chasse was tackled by three law officers on a downtown street corner before a dozen eyewitnesses. James was not suspected of a crime, he had not committed a crime.

The officers beat him, kicked him, broke 17 ribs and his shoulder. They used a Taser on him repeatedly. He screamed for mercy.
The officers thought James was a drug dealer, a homeless person, a non-person, a ghost. They were wrong. James was a poet, a musician, he had a family which loved him, friends, neighbors, dreams and hopes. He was an artist; a small, shy, gentle person. And he was a person with schizophrenia.

James was sent by paramedics to jail. Jail nurses refused to admit him. He died en route to a hospital in a police car driven by the same officers who had earlier beaten him.

A grand jury refused to indict those officers. The City and County refused to terminate or discipline them.

Alien Boy is a feature length documentary film about the life and death of James Chasse. 


A massive amount of local PDX media coverage of the story and its continued fallout can be found here.

BUT...on to the main point of this post:  Alien Boy is in the post-production stage of its existence at this moment.  In order for the filmmakers to be able to present this important story to an audience, they need to raise additional funding for post.  Lindstrom and company have decided to take their need directly to the people via Kickstarter, the popular fundraising website that's being used for the crowd financing of so many creative projects lately.

At the moment of this posting, Alien Boy has received pledges for almost a third of it's post-production funding via this Kickstarter campaign.  More info about the film and how you can join the 70+ backers of the project via a financial donation of anywhere between $1 and $5000 (or more) can be found on the Alien Boy Kickstarter page.

More links:
The official website for the film.
The Alien Boy production blog.
Alien Boy's Facebook page.

PIFF schedule online

The schedule for the 34th annual Portland International Film Festival is now available online.  The festival runs from Feb. 10th through the 26th.  Hit the link for listings, dates, venues and ticket purchase information.

Time to geek out, y'all.

Hot off the presses: PIFF schedules are out!

I stopped by the offices of the Northwest Film Center School of Film yesterday and--lo & behold--was rewarded for my drive with a copy of this year's schedule for the Portland International Film Festival.  Lots of opportunities to see films (88 features and 42 shorts, by my count) from around the globe in February.

I'm pretty excited about the inclusion of this Chilean film by director Patricio Guzmán (The Battle of Chile):

as well as When We Leave, the debut feature from Turkish German director Feo Aladag, starring Sibel Kekilli (of Fatih Akin's Head-On):

I'll keep an eye out and post an update when the online schedule goes live.  If waiting isn't your game, you've got a pretty good chance of scoring a copy of the printed version over at the Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum or NW Film Center offices.

And as I mentioned in an earlier post, I'll be checking out the first of the press screenings for this year's festival this Monday.  First up, Kawasaki's Rose from the Czech Republic:

and Silent Souls from Russia:

Until then...

What's in a name?

Just in case anyone's wondering, the name of the blog is inspired by two things:

First off, there's the old folk song "Portland Town" by Derroll Adams:

Here's a beautiful cover of the song by Jeremy Barnes' (formerly of Neutral Milk Hotel) band, A Hawk and a Handsaw:

Secondly, I've had the simple rhyme "The Rain Shits Down on Portlandtown" drifting through my mind for past many winters spent in PDX.  Been saving it as the title for a song (so don't steal it, folks) but haven't got around to writing that ditty yet.  For some reason, when naming the blog, I decided that while it was the perfect name for a tune, it might be a tad too crass as a blog name--thus, the slight change.  Ah, my personal aesthetics...sometimes they're a mystery even to me.

So, there you have it.  The long way 'round how we (the royal we, obviously) arrived at the name.  Hopefully, it's not too boring a tale.  And, seriously, check out the A Hawk and a Handsaw clip...it's gorgeous!