By Black Film.com correspondent, Leslie (Hoban) Blake
The latest New Directors/New Films looked to its own past with a major side-bar retrospective of five early discoveries, even as it presented its current crop of what’s new on the as-yet-undiscovered filmmaker scene. Kevin Smith, Todd Solondz, Charles Burnett, Lodge Kerrigan and Gregg Araki were each represented not only by their ND/NF debut films, but later works as well.
Subjects ranged from coming-of-age (both gay and straight), dysfunctional families, road trips and politics to Sci-Fi, K Horror, plus a touch of neo-realism and films followed by an * already have distributors.
Sundance was very much in evidence in two very different neo-realist works. Courtney Hunt’s Sundance Grand Jury Drama Prize winner, “Frozen River*,” featuring Melissa Leo (“Homicide”) and Misty Upham (“Skin Walkers) as two women with nothing-left-to-lose, presented a portrait of fierce vulnerability in a dangerous and illegal venture.
Lance Hammer’s “Ballast*,” also shown at Sundance, will inevitably be compared to Charles Burnett’s early, improvisatory works using non-professional actors. Hammer managed to combine many coming-of-age/dysfunctional family tropes into a singular work of stark realism.
And this year’s Sundance Grand Jury Documentary Prize winner ,” Tia Lessin and Carlo Deal’s “Trouble the Waters,” showing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina joined New York film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s doc “Moving Midway,” where re-locating his Southern family’s plantation unearthed a here-to-fore unknown African American branch of the family.
The majority of ND/NF films were, as always, comprised of new works from the International scene. Among the French films, “La France,” by Serge Bozon offered a new take on an old war with a melancholic musical WW I fairy tale while Celine Sciamma plumbed the depths of teen age self discovery in “Water Lilies*” without the aid of any visible adults.
France made its presence known in multiple co-productions: with Israel for the romantic comedy “Jellyfish*” (Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen) as well as Haiti for the political tone poem on Colonialism, “Eat, For This is My Body” (Michelange Quay). And there were two Franco-Lebanese co-productions: “A Lost Man,” Danielle Arbid’s exploration of sexual taboos in the Arab World and “Falling from Earth,” Chadi Zeneddine’s tribute to Beirut via four tales, each set a decade apart.
Israel’s solo entry, “Japan Japan” from Lior Shariz, tackled gay coming-of-age in 21st Century Tel Aviv with graphic internet porn, while Japan itself offered Naoko Ogigami’s vacation fantasia, “Megane.”
Other Asian films included “Soul Carriage,” a Sino-British collaboration about Chinese migrant workers by Conrad Clark and “We Went to Wonderland, ” Xiaolu Guo’s lightly comic vision of the effect of globalization on leisure travel. That K-Horror previously mentioned. “Epitaph” by South Korea’s Jung brothers, dealt with a haunted hospital.
Finally, a trio of Latin American films featured Rodrigo Pia’s film-noir-ish “La Zona,” a robbery-gone-bad co-pro between Spain and Mexico, Alex Rivera’s imaginative Sci-Fi take on the future of Mexico’s illegal immigrants and Lucia Puenzo’s subtle and moving “XXY*”, an insight into the world of a young Argentinian hermaphrodite faced with making decisions about her/his sexuality.
All in all, a tasty combo platter for anyone seeking new International film treats.
The 37th New Directors/New Films Series