The Mozambican Portuguese poet Virgilio de Lemos once wrote that the city of Lisbon “sees itself as an unfinished, incomplete city, open to metamorphoses…open to the delirious imagination of its lovers.” Imagine those ideals in a film festival, and one would have as good a way as any to describe the charm of Lisbon’s new IndieLisboa Film Festival (April 23 - May 3). Celebrating just its sixth edition this past April, IndieLisboa may indeed be young and a bit unfinished, but that’s all part of the appeal; compared to the rather bloated excesses of its European brethren like Cannes, Berlin, or Venice, this festival is intimate, quiet, open to metamorphoses, and, above all, open to the delirious imagination of film (and its lovers). Like Lisbon itself, it rewards those who enjoy traveling off the beaten path, revealing its charms not to those who rush, but those who linger.

Whereas most other European festivals trot out the same excessive lineup of tried-and-true, auteur-or-star-driven titles that were in the last festival (it’s a vaguely hidden secret that many festival films just flitter blandly from one city to the next, like some fashionable H.M.V. seasonal outfit), IndieLisboa aims to have a thematic mission. For this festival, the “indie” in its name is not some marketing copy, but the integral reason for its existence. To quote the programmers Miguel Valverde, Nuno Sena, and Rui Pereira, the focus is on “an original and demanding film program... dedicated to discovering and sharing the best in new cinema through the world.” No Holllywood-lite “independent” works, cross-nationalized Europudding, or big-budget Asian genre films here, just a tight focus of around 60 features from around the world, and a deepening concern for the best in new Portuguese cinema. In addition to the competition works, there were strands dedicated to documentaries, emerging cinema, music films (“IndieMusic”), films on filmmaking (the “Director’s Cut” section), children’s and young adult films (“IndieJunior”), and retrospectives of two “intransigently non-conformist and individualist” directors, Werner Herzog and Jacques Nolot (surprisingly, neither one had had full retrospectives before in Portugal).

The festival’s knack for assembling a cohesive, effective program was especially pronounced in their selection of American titles. Last year's award-winning success of Azazel Jacob's Momma's Man highlighted IndieLisboa’s status as a rewarding new avenue for emerging American independent film. This year they solidified that relationship, with a program that reads like a who's who of current U.S. indies, including Lance Hammer's Ballast and Sean Baker's Prince of Broadway (both in competition), as well as Barry Jenkin's Medicine For Melancholy, Josh Safdie's The Pleasure of Being Robbed, and Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy. (Ballast, Medicine and Wendy & Lucy have all been written of extensively in Filmmaker).

A film on a thief, rootlessness, and the simple pleasures of not knowing whether to speak to someone, or steal from them, The Pleasure of Being Robbed gained notoriety last year for being the only American feature chosen for Cannes’ prestigious Directors Fortnight section (Safdie’s newest, Go Get Some Rosemary, featured in Cannes this year). Like his purse-snatching, ever-drifting heroine, Safdie knows that success is in sleight-of-hand and constant motion, and so his vision of cinema is filled with magic and movement, of fragile, seemingly spontaneous moments that surprise at every turn. The film’s 16mm images lend it a warmth and texture missing in digital video, while its structure is as deceivingly simple as the Thelonius Monk tune that frames its soundtrack. It’s no surprise that The Pleasure of Being Robbed was chosen for Cannes; this sweet-natured ramble invokes Celine and Julie, Rivette and Eustache, and others for whom cinema, like making polar bears appear in Central Park, is magic.

If Pleasures takes it cues from Rivette or Eustache, Sean Baker’s Prince of Broadway (pictured above) takes its own from the street-level immediacy of the Dardennes Brothers and the baroquely verbalized New York City landscapes of Taxi Driver-era Martin Scorcese. Following a Ghanian immigrant-turned-Garment District-hustler as he deals with knock-off sneakers, uncertain customers, random hoodlums, and a little boy who may or may not be his son, Prince of Broadway captures the movements, aesthetics, and verbiage of life in one substrata of New York City, circa 2008, with utter precision. Along with his earlier film Take Out (co-directed with Shih-Ching Tsou), Baker is creating a visual history of New York City that will one day stand with Scorcese’s efforts; Baker’s, however, will be recognized as far more immediate, and far more realistic. Few American filmmakers today are able to use the on-the-fly freedom of the digital aesthetic—skeletal crew, little equipment, improvisational filming—to capture the way people live, move, and talk today better than Baker. Mixing a fictionalized plot with a very real situation—the lives of Chinese restaurant workers in Take Out, or marginalized African immigrants in the city’s hustler underground in Prince of Broadway — Baker is developing an aesthetic that’s as vibrant as the Dardennes, but with a New York City roughness all his own.

Baker was one of the few American filmmakers able to attend IndieLisboa, a shame considering the real hospitality of the festival staff and the relaxed vibe of the entire event. No power lunches or industry-only screenings here; instead, filmmakers had the space and time to mingle with one another, and to respond to audience hungry for new filmmaking. “It was encouraging to see how enthusiastic the audiences are for indie film,” Baker noted. “I wish the US audiences were as hungry for hard to find indies as the Portuguese are.” The festival’s relatively small layout—around 4-5 screening venues scattered around this highly walkable, tree-lined city, each easily accessible by metro or a festival mini-bus—made running into fellow guests simple; mornings found many attendees sharing coffee and brunch at the festival hotel, while late nights found them congregated at the festival’s “official” gathering spot, the notorious nightclub Cabaret Maxine, a former brothel turned atmospheric bar and music showcase.

A chance to sample Lisbon’s venues and former brothels wasn’t the only insight into Portuguese culture the festival offered, of course; thanks to the indefatigable Manoel de Oliveira, the sphinx-like Pedro Costa, and the youthful Miguel Gomes, Portuguese cinema is currently one of the most vibrant cinemas in Europe. Possibly Portuguese cinema's most famous name, Manoel de Oliveira (now over 100 years old) debuted his newest film, Eccentricities of a Blonde-Haired Girl, at the festival, but it's some of the lesser-known directors that made an even more intriguing impression. Ivo M. Ferreira unlocked the emotional scars of the 1974 Portuguese Revolution in his family drama/road trip work April Showers, which followed a young man's search through the dry Alentejo and coastal Algarve regions for the mystery behind his father's disappearance. Joao Rosas' experimental documentary Birth of a City combined visual snapshots of London with the story of an artist literally painting a similar portrait of city; its uniting of cinema, painting, and poetic voice-overs refreshingly avoided heavy-handedness for a pleasing, memorable lightness. In Ruinas (Ruins), by Manuel Mozos, there's a different kind of city landscape: it's a documentary on ruined buildings, with Mozos training his camera on abandoned homes, deserted hospitals, and crumbling estates like von Sternberg trained his camera on Dietrich. Epic long takes allow viewers to appreciate the sheer beauty of decay (it's a powerful film to see in Lisbon, home of countless similar old ruins), while narrators accompany the images with texts from various centuries, all recounting obituaries, sicknesses, loves lost, even hotel accommodation requests. Produced by the same group behind Miguel Gomes' Our Beloved Month of August (one of the best new Portuguese films of the year, and one whose off-the-cuff traveling aesthetic should stand as an example to all American independent filmmakers, too), Ruins has a quiet visual poetry similar to the landscape cinema of James Benning, only fleshed out with a saudade-fueled sorrow that seems to ooze from the Portuguese setting. Mozos’ camera lingers on each devastated home, every broken window or crumbling wall; here the setting becomes emotion, with each static take revealing the movement (or stasis) of history, the poetry of loss.

It’s no coincidence that Ruins won the Best Portuguese Feature Film Award at the festival, while Lance Hammer’s Ballast won the prestigious Feature Film Grand Prize (and its suitcase full of 15,000 Euros). While literally worlds apart, both films are fueled with this poetry of loss; filled with ruins, landscapes or individuals seemingly caught between collapsing or rising, each embrace the unfinished, the unpolished. It’s a type of cinema that, like IndieLisboa, and this city, rewards those who linger, and revel in the unknown.

Labels: Festivals

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 6/09/2009 11:31:00 AM Comments (0)

Now in its 18th year, the Aspen ShortsFest (April 1-5) has long had a reputation as one of the premiere North American showcases for short films. The Academy Award-qualifying festival culls together eight short programs each year, two of which unfold daily over four consecutive nights in Aspen’s elegant, reconstruction-era Wheeler Opera House. Spearheaded by the team of Executive Director Laura Thielen and Director of Programming George Eldard, the festival has a penchant for programming a sharp, international selection that showcases work that runs the gamut of budgets, sizes and aesthetic compositions.

Fifty-nine films, culled from over 2,500 entries, screened in this year’s international competition. A quiet, stately affair, the festival does a terrific job of reaching out to the citizens of this wealthy resort town, one where everyone seems over 60 or under 20, capturing their imaginations with films that offer a strong counterpoint to their Hollywood-fed assumptions of what filmmaking can and should be. Drawing heavily from Sundance (Dustin Daniel Cretton’s Grand Jury Prize-winner Short Term 12) and Claremont Ferrand (Claire Berger’s Forbach), Aspen is not a hot world premiere destination for Shorts but nonetheless has the feel of a discovery festival. Due to the intimacy of its program, films that may have slipped through the cracks in larger festivals get the attention they demand in this snowy mountain setting.

One such film is Luke Doolan’s Miracle Fish (pictured above), a searing and mysterious Australian short about a school shooting that bowed at Sundance this year and was perhaps the most well-received film in Aspen. Doolan focuses on a troubled child, delivered to school late by his irresponsible mother, made fun of by his unforgiving classmates for his mother’s welfare status, who feels ill and takes a nap in his elementary school infirmary. When he wakes up, he discovers that everyone in his school has vanished. What begins as a troubled child narrative quickly begins to play out like a supernatural tale, with hints of David Lynch in its haunting, claustrophobic framing and a gaunt, washed out color scheme. The film envelopes us effortlessly in the mystery of where all the other students and faculty members have gone, trolling down hallways and through classrooms in graceful tracking shots reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, but the finale Doolan has in store for us is frighteningly grounded look at the morbid finality of guns and the abstraction that an unsuspecting child may make of a deadly and tragic circumstance.

Among narrative short filmmakers, although there was much to like on display from just about every corner of the world, the most intriguing films seem to be coming from down under. Doolan, like fellow Aussie and Kiwi short filmmakers like David Michod (Netherland Dwarf), Rene Hernandez (The Ground Beneath), Katie Wolfe (This is Her) and Julius Avery (Jerrycan) brings a keen sense of youthful melancholy and an accomplished visual style to tales of the disappointments and dangers of childhood. Together, they represent the largest outpouring of talent to come from the isles since the Australian New Wave of the late ’70s. While it’s tough to lump these filmmakers together because of the breadth of the work, they all are making formally challenging and very dark films, many of which center on the disappointments and dangers of Aussie and Kiwi working class life.

Although in the past I’ve found that Aspen’s animated and narrative programming was stronger than its documentary programming, this year’s festival included a host of terrific documentaries. Will Perinello’s Richard Gere-narrated, Dali Lama-featuring Tibetan restoration doc Mustang – Journey of Transformation, Susan Cohn Rockefeller’s Jewish-doctor-goes-to-Ethiopia-and-adopts-sick-kids chronicle Making the Crooked Straight, Jill Orschel’s unforgettable portrait of a Mormon polygamist Sister Wife and Deborah Koons Garcia’s modest organic-farming doc Soil in Good Heart found loving partisans. The most powerful of the docs and winner of the festival’s best documentary prize was The Witness: From the Balcony of Room 306, Adam Pertofsky’s Oscar-nominated profile of Reverend Samuel “Billy” Kyles, who was standing next to Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. when he was slain outside a Memphis hotel room in 1968. While maintaining a hopeful tone that doesn’t succumb to melancholy, the doc accurately captures the contours and fissures that were developing in the Civil Rights Movement at the time and the hearty sense of disappointment and doom that King felt as he restlessly campaigned for the rights and wages of waste workers in that particular southern city. It’s an unforgettable cinematic experience.

Labels: Festivals

# posted by Jason Guerrasio @ 6/09/2009 11:30:00 AM Comments (0)