Always an indication of the imminent onset of awards season, AFI Fest typically gets ahead of the curve with world and local premieres of would-be contenders. For some films, it’s a prestigious Hollywood launching pad to build momentum toward the Golden Globes, guild honors and the Oscars, while for others it’s a brief moment in the spotlight before getting eclipsed by higher-profile titles.

This year’s fest (Oct. 30 - Nov. 9) hit a significant snag even before kicking off, when Paramount pulled opener The Soloist, which will now premiere in theaters in March, 2009, from opening night. AFI Fest fortuitously filled the slot with the world premiere of Miramax’s Doubt, writer-director John Patrick Shanley’s dour inquisition of a suspected pedophile priest (resolutely played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), adapted from the filmmaker’s original Broadway stage production.

After opening night at the Arclight Cinerama Dome, AFI Fest screenings expanded to the historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater and adjacent multiplex in the heart of Hollywood. With the apparent goal of adding another prominent gala venue, the growing scope of the festival proved a challenge for screenings scheduled at different theaters, although a reliable shuttle service connected the Roosevelt Hotel, site of the badgeholders’ Cinema Lounge, to the Arclight complex down Sunset Blvd.

Castmembers from Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler were among those walking the red carpet at the Grauman, including a reinvigorated Mickey Rourke, who gives a staggering performance as middle-aged Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a third-rate professional pugilist confronting health problems and an emotional crisis that threaten not only his career but his fundamental self-image. Kudos came to the The Wrestler’s rescue late in the fall, with Golden Globe and Spirit Award nominations.

Somewhat skirting the limelight prior to the spring 2009 release of Sugar, directors Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden brought their newest indie drama to the fest. The film recounts the recruitment of Dominican baseball pitcher "Sugar" Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) for the U.S. minor leagues with a familiar immigrant arc coupled to a somewhat unconventional warts-and-all sports drama. Spot-on casting, sensitive storytelling and authentic performances – particularly by the nonpros, including newcomer Soto -- make Sugar a title to watch during next year’s awards contests.

Among the documentary selections, Playing Columbine made a surprisingly convincing case for creative license and free speech in the realm of video games. After crafting a decidedly low-tech game that allows players to reenact the gruesome high school massacre, designer and director Danny Ledonne endured widespread criticism for his alleged insensitivity to the shootings. Thoughtfully responding to the controversy, Ledonne interviewed video game designers, players, advocates and critics for a wider perspective on issues related to free speech and gaming.

Kief Davidson’s Kassim the Dream (pictured above) – a profile of former Ugandan child soldier Kassim Ouma, who battled his way to world junior middleweight boxing champion -- landed a one-two combination to win both the jury and audience doc prizes, sharing the latter award with The World We Want, a hopeful portrayal of international youth activists promoting positive social change in their communities.

Federico Veiroj’s Uruguayan coming of age comedy Acne won the grand jury prize among international narratives, with American indie drama A Necessary Death by Daniel Stamm taking the audience award.

International features comprise a large proportion of AFI Fest programming, drawn from world and North American premieres, prestige festivals and regional releases. Following up on its Toronto International Film Festival People’s Choice award, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire made another favorable impression at AFI Fest, where Boyle was treated to a career tribute before the screening.

AFI alum Ed Zwick returned to the festival with the world premiere of Paramount Vantage’s Defiance, a World War II actioner starring Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber that’s adapted from a nonfiction book recounting how a group of Jewish resistance fighters took refuge in the Russian forests and launched guerilla attacks on German forces rather than face extermination by the invading Nazis.

Despite the stirring storyline, Zwick’s typically energetic directing style can’t adequately animate the strained relationship between the two brothers leading the partisans, played by Craig and Schreiber, whose performances often seem disengaged from one another, draining the film of essential vitality.

Labels: Festivals

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The Louis Vuitton Hawaii International Film Festival (Oct. 9-19) prides itself on being a bridge between “East and West,” but this year’s edition found its greatest strength in films even closer to home (or as close to home as Hawaii can get, considering it’s the most geographically isolated populated landmass in the world). Festival programmer Anderson Le and director Chuck Boller brought in the usual dizzying array of films and filmmakers from around the Pacific Rim, with Chinese melodramas, Japanese comedies, and Korean thrillers among the many choices on offer this year, but also spotlighted low-budget works from Hawaii and other Pacific Islands, including the first feature films ever from Guam and the Marshall Islands. No longer content to be a mere “bridge” between East and West, this year’s festival promised to highlight the Pacific Islands as a creative locale in its own right.

Don and Kel Muna’s Shiro’s Head (pictured above), from Guam, and Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz’s Morning Comes So Soon, from the Marshall Islands, represent the tip of this new Pacific wave. Both films were born more from love and desire than any concrete system; with neither Guam nor the Marshall Islands having a film industry, these filmmakers made not only the films, but the entire support structure, themselves. Brothers Don and Kel Muna gained their education in Southern California film schools and honed their film skills with Northern California wedding videos before returning to Guam to make Shiro’s Head, a gang-tinged family drama with an intriguing rhythm all its own. Schoolteachers Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz joined forces with Marshallese youth nonprofit organizations to create Morning Comes So Soon, a Romeo-and-Juliet love story set among indigenous Marshallese and recent Chinese immigrants. Made in American territories located as near to Asia as to the U.S. mainland, both films merge American-indie tropes and character structure with the aesthetic freedom and experimental ethos of new work from the Philippines and China, creating a blend that’s truly (to echo the festival’s claim) a bridge between East and West.

A world-weary thug with soulful eyes and cheekbones so sharp they could cut glass stares aggressively into the camera; directly addressing the audience with a declaration of vengeance and death (delivered in the native Chamorro language), he then flicks a lit cigarette at the lens as the image suddenly, breathlessly freezes: This is the dramatic opening scene of Shiro’s Head, and a declaration of intent that this is no by-the-numbers film. A young man returns to the island to find himself an outsider in his own realm, trying to make sense of a family mystery, a love triangle and a criminal enterprise, all while deflecting the antagonism of various threatening locals, including a seething Mohawked punk. The plot could be borrowed from countless other genre films, but the Munas filter it through a distinctly Guamian landscape and culture; even the simple fact that it’s delivered partly in Chamorro, a language whose use is declining even in Guam, serves as a form of cultural resistance. (A quick prowl through IMDb, in fact, lists Shiro’s Head as the only film ever made in Chamorro.) The Guam of Shiro’s Head is no tropical dreamland of palm trees and sun-kissed beaches, but rather a nightmare of weed-cracked asphalt sidewalks, concrete shacks, and moody machos with trouble in mind, constantly lingering uneasily on the periphery. It’s a landscape that’s normally erased from all images of the region, but for Shiro’s Head it’s the only one that matters, and the Munas fill it with legends, mysteries and ciphers. This is filmmaking designed not only to tell stories, but to preserve them, and to even preserve the language that tells them. The Munas’s commitment to capturing local life and flavor isn’t just in front of the camera, either; they recruited a host of local musicians to lend songs to the film’s diverse soundtrack and organized their friends and neighbors for cast, crew and support.

Morning Comes So Soon boasts its own commitment to place and culture, in this case the Marshall Islands, a Micronesian nation of multiple islands and U.S. territory. Working with local high school youth (and sponsored by a U.N.E.S.C.O. grant), directors Aaron Condon and Mike Cruz mold a familiar Romeo-and-Juliet plot onto the area’s simmering cultural tensions and contemporary problems. An easy-going local boy (the appealing James Bing III, plucked from an area high school) falls for a young Chinese teen (Ting-Yu Lin, also from a local high school), who works in her mother’s convenience store, but soon trouble emerges from both the boy’s racist friends and the girl’s suspicious family.

Using a teenage love affair for the structure, Morning tackles not only the island’s current political issues of racial unrest, unemployment and economic collapse, but also more psychological issues like depression and family communication. Part island tragedy and part youth documentary, Morning also succeeds as a portrait of teenage life on the Marshall Islands with its everyday rhythms and ordinary sights, while its spoken dialogue of Marshallese, English slang and Chinese serves as a virtual mirror to the area’s polyglot nature. There’s a quiet, serene rhythm to many of the shots, but a just-as-present lingering tension; it may be “paradise,” but something’s not quite right. A scene on a beach underneath a hanging palm serves as the only concession to tropical beauty, but even that setting soon turns into something far more tragic. Instead we have a setting more inner-city than outer-island, of convenience stores and basketball courts, low-ceilinged windowless rooms and stuffy schoolrooms, and of young teens stuck with seemingly nowhere to go.

Evidently it spoke to the local community: Morning was originally to be screened once or twice in a local theater, but it was held over and screened multiple times a day after outdrawing its Hollywood competition and fostered renewed discussions on racism, depression and community relations on the island.

The festival found further success even closer to home in the form of the Audience Award-winning Chief, a gorgeously shot mini epic from director Brett Wagner that, in only twenty-something minutes, created a perfectly realized, psychological Polynesian noir, filmed under Oahu’s blinding sun yet as dark as any nocturnal thriller, and with a hard-boiled performance by Chief Sielu Avea that would make even Robert Mitchum take note. The Best Documentary winner was another Hawaiian labor of love, Anna Keala Kelly’s Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawaii, which detailed in straightforward, passionate detail the impact of militarism and tourism on native Hawaiians, and the Hawaiians’ continuing fight for their land and rights.

It’s been hard for the festival to toe that line between serious artistic venue and easy-going vacation destination (its official Web site interviews of filmmakers include queries like, “What kind of sunscreen do you prefer?”). Visiting filmmakers, critics and programmers find a schedule that makes it simple to do both; most screenings start in the late afternoon, leaving plenty of time beforehand to sample the island’s non-theatrical pleasures, while most films are done by midnight or so, leaving plenty of time to, um, sample the island’s non-theatrical pleasures. The festival’s always been known for its spotlight on emerging Asian filmmakers and Asian genre works; this year’s focus on Hawaiian and Pacific Island films, however, may turn HIFF into not only an “aloha” destination, but a place of discovery as well.

Labels: Festivals

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