Review

Suspense, stillness, and beauty in "Three Monkeys"

When Nuri Bilge Ceylan won the Best Director prize at Cannes last year for Three Monkeys—which opens on the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Friday—it couldn’t have been much of a surprise. He’d been winning awards since his first feature (1997’s Kasaba a.k.a. Small Town), including prior Cannes ones for Distant (2002) and Climates (2006), while Clouds of May (1999) was nominated for the Golden Bear at Berlin.

That’s pretty heady achievement for a 50-year-old director who’s only worked in film since 1995 (debuting with the short Koza), and whose five features to date haven’t yet fully distracted him from his other creative pursuit as a photographer. (It’s a craft that’s very much present in the painstaking beauty of his films’ typically stationary shots.)

topics: directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Critic's Notebook

Lee Isaac Chung on "Munyurangabo" and the language of film

Early Hungarian film theoretician Béla Bálazs, like many others witnessing the transition from silent films to "talkies," saw cinema as a wordless language, or a visual one. Bálazs was disturbed by the coming of sound and speech, viewing it as a second Tower of Babel that would destroy the universality of cinema. Yet, 85 years later, despite newspaper headlines that would make you believe we are all being ripped apart, cinema— through gestures, emotions, and empathy—remains a universal language.

One can’t help but think about the concept of cinematic language, as well as spoken language, when talking with filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung. Prior to making Munyurangabo —which is set in present-day rural Rwanda, and the first film in the Kinyarwandan language—Chung spent 3 months in China without a translator making a film. He also has created shorts in different languages, and now has his sights on Germany for a future project. The transparency of divisions through spoken language is resonant in his work.

[Editor’s note: Munyurangabo plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki through June 18.]

topics: african cinema, directors, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Take Two

"Fados" finds Saura on his toes

It is a typical complaint amongst older people that they miss most the passions, the fervent enthusiasms of their youth. Some folk, however, discover some new passion late in life that they pursue with unprecedented ardor—possibly to the bewilderment of those (including grown offspring) who now miss the more level-headed, more single-minded person they used to be.

One might conjecture something like that happened to Carlos Saura, the Spanish director who from the late 1950s onward made frequently striking films like Peppermint Frappe (1967) and Cria! (1977). Both of those starred his wife Geraldine Chaplin, who quickly became fluent in Spanish and had just the right sort of grave delicacy to inhabit his alternately sorrowful and caustic portraits of life in Franco’s Spain—a muzzled world whose strictures he (mostly) managed the artist’s trick of criticizing just slyly enough to avoid censorship.

topics: dance, directors, music, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Take Two

"Examined Life" puts ideas into action

There have been a fair number of films and filmmakers considered to have a philosophical bent—Ingmar Bergman, to cite one of the more obvious examples. But movies have rarely addressed philosophy itself head-on. It makes sense: Really, how much can you do cinematically with an area that must basically come down to people talking about abstract concepts?

Which is exactly what Astra Taylor’s Examined Life consists of. The surprise is how engaging this documentary sampler of nine leading contemporary theorists emerges. Not just because the personalities and ideas are stimulating, but because Taylor (who previously directed another philosophy doc, 2005’s Zizek!) has the very bright idea of interviewing her subjects on the move, in settings that one way or another in real world terms illustrate (or contrast with) the concepts they discuss.

[Editor’s note: Director Astra Taylor and subject Sunaura Taylor appear in person at the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas on Friday, March 6, and Sunday, March 8. More at SFFS.]

topics: authors, directors, documentary, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki

Experience

Fearless: Strand Releasing turns 20

Nineteen eighty nine was famously the year Amerindie cinema exploded with Sex, Lies and Videotape. But it was also the year something perhaps equally important to independent film happened: Marcus Hu, Jon Gerrans and Mike Thomas co-founded Strand Releasing, which remains an active, irreplaceable and distinctive presence on the U.S. distribution scene twenty years later. (Thomas left the company in the late ’90s.)

That anniversary is being celebrated with a retrospective of past Strand titles at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. (More on it below.) But that series can only scratch the surface of a catalog encompassing over 200 features and some of the great names in film both here and around the world. Just a glance at what it’s currently got in theatres gives you an idea of its adventurousness: Brit Terence Davies’ poetic documentary-memoir Of Time and the City; Doris Dörrie’s German-Japanese seriocomedy Cherry Blossoms; Lance Hammer’s highly acclaimed Amerindie drama Ballast; Bruce LaBruce’s latest provocation Otto, or Up With Dead People; and fellow Canadian Claude Miller’s sweeping intergenerational sale Un Secret.

topics: avant-garde, awards, bay area, cult cinema, curators, digital filmmaking, distribution, distributors, diy, documentary, frameline, hollywood, independent film, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema, yerba buena center for the arts

Insider

Danish "Just Another Love Story" offers shock treatment

A title like Just Another Love Story is its own disclaimer, hinting there will be nothing “normal,” or very loving, about this story.

[SF360.org editor’s note: Some plot points are revealed in this preview.]

Indeed, within the first five minutes we’ve witnessed two deaths, coitus interrupted by curious tot, and a gruesome domestic crime scene’s aftermath. An opening this flashy, this determined to provoke, raises both expectations and apprehensions: Will the movie end up justifying its extremes, or turn out to be an exercise in trying too hard?

For a while one isn’t quite sure—but this twisty latterday noir by writer-director Ole Bornedal (of the period epic I Am Dina and ghoulish Nightwatch’s dual Danish/U.S. versions) on SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki this Friday turns out to be headed somewhere other than the gratuitously pyrotechnic. Indeed, for many it might be the 2009 equivalent of last year’s French import Tell No One as a genuinely complicated thriller that offers pulp satisfaction without ever collapsing into the preposterousness or testosterone excess of a typical Hollywood suspense gizmo.

topics: actors, noir, reviews, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema

Platform

Stephane Gauger on "Owl and the Sparrow," and a new view of Vietnam

When 6’ 3" Stephane Gauger arrives for an interview with his all-American look, wearing a baseball cap inscribed with "The Jimi Hendrix Experience," it’s hard to imagine him as director of a film designed to be a "love letter to the city of Saigon." Just the word Saigon summons up long-forgotten images of the longest war in U.S. history, but for Gauger, it’s his birthplace, son of a Vietnamese mother and an American father of German descent who moved to Vietnam in 1966.

Still there’s no reflection of that country’s beleagured history in Owl and the Sparrow, his fable-like movie starring Thuy, an indomitable 10-year old orphan who tries to seek her own way in the big city and finds friendship with a lonely flight attendant and a teen-age caretaker of elephants in a zoo that is his haven from the urban hustle and bustle. The film plays the SFFS Screen at the Sundance Kabuki starting Friday.

topics: asian cinema, bay area, independent film, sffs screen at the sundance kabuki, world cinema