Authors — Damon Smith
-
ELIA SULEIMAN, “THE TIME THAT REMAINS”
Award-winning Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention) makes idiosyncratic films about the endless conflict between Arabs and Israelis, stitching together wryly humorous tableaux that speak to the absurdity of life under occupation. Suleiman himself is often a character in these tragicomic dramas, a mute witness quietly observing the agitations of the Middle East at ground level, with lidded eyes and a mournful face that commentators have repeatedly likened to Buster Keaton’s. As a youth infatuated with socialism, Suleiman (now 50) fled a pending arrest warrant in Nazareth (the authorities were under the impression he was a gang member) and moved […]
by Damon Smith on Jan 5, 2011 -
BRUNO DUMONT, “HADEWIJCH”
A former philosophy professor, 52-year-old writer-director Bruno Dumont got his start making commercial films in the ’80s, eventually penning a novel that served as the basis for his extraordinary 1996 debut La Vie de Jesus. Filmed in the tiny provincial hamlet of Bailleul, France, where Dumont grew up, this story of a listless gang of moped-riding teens has nothing at all to do with the Gospels: it is an oblique title for a movie that begins and ends with a death, and whose epileptic protagonist is an odd-looking, hauntingly inexpressive adolescent. Humanité, which won the Grand Prix at the 1999 […]
by Damon Smith on Dec 22, 2010 -
Ry Russo-Young, You Won’t Miss Me
Something of a prodigy even before she made her first feature, Manhattan native Ry Russo-Young (Orphans) had an early apprenticeship in the medium, studying visual arts and drama at Oberlin College and Yale, respectively, before putting in some time at the Lee Strasberg Institute and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Russo-Young eventually directed the short film Marion, a multi-screen deconstruction of scenes from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho enacted by three actresses, which won the 2005 Silver Hugo Award for best experimental short film at the Chicago International Film Festival. Two years later, she debuted Orphans, an emotionally wrenching drama about […]
by Damon Smith on Dec 8, 2010 -
21st STOCKHOLM FILM FESTIVAL EMBRACES INDIE TALENT ON THE RISE
For ten days every November, cinephiles of every stripe are afforded an opportunity to revel in a crowd- and critic-pleasing smorgasbord of plucky international programming at the Stockholm International Film Festival, now in its 21st season. Yes it’s cold and the sun sets early in the afternoon, but what better excuse to take refuge in one of the capital city’s well-appointed, old-fashioned movie halls? Under director Git Scheynius, who co-founded the annual festival in 1990, the main focus of the competition is to provide a showcase for rising young talent, directors like Aaron Katz (Cold Weather) or Xavier Dolan (whose […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 30, 2010 -
ONDI TIMONER, “COOL IT”
Acclaimed documentarian Ondi Timoner has a knack for picking wildly unpredictable subjects and then going all in, detailing the drama of self-destruction from an insider’s vantage point. Both Anton Newcombe, the fiery frontman of cult-rock mainstays The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Josh Harris, dotcom entrepreneur and Internet stunt artist, were brilliant, fascinating personalities dancing along the edge of personal and professional annihilation in Timoner’s previous Sundance Grand Jury Prize–winning films, Dig! (2004) and We Live in Public (2009). So one imagines the intrepid documentarian hunting around for another larger-than-life character to hitch her cameras to, a mad scientist, perhaps, who’s […]
by Damon Smith on Nov 10, 2010 -
BILL PLYMPTON, “IDIOTS AND ANGELS”
If two-time Oscar-nominated animator Bill Plympton had been alive in early 20th century Berlin, he’d surely have aligned himself with Dadaists like George Grosz and Otto Dix, satiric artists whose mastery of the comic grotesque are echoed in the Oregon native’s deranged, darkly comic visions of everyday life. Like his illustrious predecessors, Plympton was a widely published illustrator and political cartoonist; his eponymous comic strip debuted 35 years ago in the Soho Weekly, years before he ever inked a cel. A decade later, after tinkering with short animation, he made his first feature, The Tune, a landmark in single-artist independent […]
by Damon Smith on Oct 27, 2010 -
Margarethe Von Trotta, Vision
One of Europe’s preeminent film directors for more than three decades, Margarethe von Trotta (Rosa Luxemburg, The Promise) was born in Berlin 1942 and relocated to Düsseldorf with her mother after the war. In Paris, where she moved after high school, Von Trotta immersed herself in film culture and became a major fixture of the New German Cinema, acting in early films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (Gods of the Plague, Beware of a Holy Whore) and collaborating closely with her ex-husband Volker Schlöndorff, with whom she co-directed the 1975 political drama The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, before helming […]
by Damon Smith on Oct 13, 2010 -
HEIDI EWING AND RACHEL GRADY, “FREAKONOMICS”
One of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film in 2005, the documentary team of Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady have gained notice in the past five years for a string of socially conscious theatrical features and television projects developed at their jointly founded company, Loki Films. The Boys of Baraka (2005) followed a group of at-risk inner-city Baltimore school kids on their journey to an experimental boarding school in rural Kenya to see whether a change of environment could inspire and motivate these youths coping with an array of problems (violence, drug addiction, absent parents) at home and in […]
by Damon Smith on Sep 29, 2010 -
Lixin Fan, Last Train Home
Not many first-time independent filmmakers land a coveted spot in the Sunday arts section of The New York Times and an interview on The Leonard Lopate Show. But 33-year-old Lixin Fan, a Chinese-born Canadian immigrant who splits his time between Montreal and Beijing, has generated a lot of interest among editors at major dailies and business publications alike for his documentary Last Train Home, a film about the annual New Year’s pilgrimage of 130 million migrant workers from Guangzhou province to their homes and seldom-seen families in the rural provinces. China’s status as an economic powerhouse regularly makes front-page […]
by Damon Smith on Sep 1, 2010 -
LOU YE, “SPRING FEVER”
When officials at the state-controlled Film Bureau levelled a five-year filmmaking ban on Chinese writer-director Lou Ye (Purple Butterfly) in 2006—a harsh reprimand for unveiling his politically charged drama Summer Palace at Cannes that year without their approval—he did what any determined artist would under the circumstances: he went home and made another feature, right under the nose of the censors. It was a brave and headstrong move, considering Lou’s previous encounters with the bureau. His debut feature, Weekend Lover (1995), was banned for two years, and Suzhou River (2000), a moody, Shanghai-set twist on Vertigo that won top honors […]
by Damon Smith on Aug 4, 2010
