Banker White’s first feature, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars, followed the titular group of musicians from a refugee camp in Guinea to their home and back again; his second feature, The Genius of Marian, is much closer to home. After his mother was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s, White came back home to help with caretaking. In 2009 he began shooting conversations with his mother for therapeutic purposes, eventually realizing he was working on his next project. Shot over three years, the resulting film was co-directed by White’s wife (then-girlfriend) Anna Fitch. Arriving in New York in advance of the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 18, 2013Many musicians have dabbled with movies, but few have stuck it out and become as well known separately for their film work as director/d.p./editor Quentin Dupieux. Formerly best known as electronica artist Mr. Oizo, Dupieux began making short films at age 15. His first two features — 2002’s Nonfilm and Steak — didn’t attract attention outside of France, but 2010’s Rubber introduced him to a wider audience. The film follows killer tire Robert’s deadly road trip across California, beginning with a direct-to-the-audience monologue from actor Stephen Spinella explaining Dupieux’s philosophy of narrative and his bizarre sense of humor. “In the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 27, 2013Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi’s Touba was seven years in the making: five of shooting, two of post-production. It grew out of her second documentary — 2008’s Youssou N’Dour: I Bring What I Love — which followed the legendary Senegalese musician before and after 2004’s Egypt album, whose religious themes raised the ire of the country’s religious argument. Her newest film began life on vibrantly grainy 16mm, following an annual Senegal trek undertaken by hundreds to the city of Touba to visit the home of Sheikh Amadou Bamba, founder of the Mouride Brotherhood. Like her last film, Vasarhelyi’s newest focuses on Islam […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2013Bryan Poyser has been a fixture of Austin’s film scene for a decade, even as it’s remained in flux. As a director, he made his feature debut with 2004’s Dear Pillow, in which a teen struggling with sex gets mentored by a fiftysomething ex-porn director. 2010’s follow-up Lovers Of Hate (half shot in Austin) was a perversely comic sexual rondelay in which a demented ex skulks in the mansion where his former partner and her new lover are taking a vacation, spying on both while trying to keep his presence a secret. Poyser’s third feature, The Bounceback, is his first […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2013Making its North American premiere at True/False, Eliane Raheb’s Sleepless Nights is ostensibly about the Lebanese Civil War’s fallout. The opening title cards recap the conflict’s history in a bewilderingly quick synopsis, and if you’re not already informed on the subject (I went in shamefully ignorant), it’ll take a while to get your bearings. The principal subjects are Assaad Shaftari, a former Christian militia senior intelligence official, credited with approving some 500 deaths; and Maryam Saiidi, whose son vanished following one skirmish — the “battle of the science building” — out of a long, complicated history (the War lasted 15 […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 8, 2013Banner news first: two days into the 10th annual True/False Film Festival, Columbia, Missouri’s immensely likable documentary/hybrid-friendly showcase, the marquee title of the six films I’ve seen so far from the slate (three of which I saw before arriving) is Omar Mullick and Bassam Tariq’s These Birds Walk. The starting point is Abdul Sattar Edhi, a Pakistani humanitarian and founder of a number of shelters, rehab centers and other faculties for the dispossessed. As he washes naked runaway children, some pitifully scrawny, he says his philanthropic reputation and prominence mean nothing; to understand his work you have to understand common […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 4, 2013Jean-Claude Brisseau’s The Girl From Nowhere is an auteur work of relatively low-profile interest to the broader public, one of several such items in Lincoln Center’s annual Rendez-Vous With French Cinema series, which starts today. Brisseau’s career is firmly bifurcated, the second part beginning with 2002’s Secret Things — overheated soft-core with classical allusions — led to lawsuits and sentencing for sexual harassment of auditioning actresses. After two more films in this humid vein, The Girl From Nowhere stars Brisseau himself in an adamantly chaste mood. A man-mountain with a body somewhere between latter-day Gerard Depardieu and NFL coach Rob […]
by Vadim Rizov on Mar 1, 2013Tuesday night at 92Y Tribeca in downtown Manhattan, critics Nick Pinkerton and Nicolas Rapold presented Walter Hill’s 1981 Southern Comfort and the man himself afterwards. “I’m very pleased that you’re looking at this movie 30 years later,” Hill first said when sitting down for a 57-minute Q&A. “You’ve made an old man happy. The movie, when it came out, got mostly bad reviews and did absolutely no business. Did better in Europe and Asia.” “Did better in Europe and Asia” is a common lament for American director prophets without honor in their own country. Hill’s not precisely one of those […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 29, 2013Ten minutes before Yin Mei’s “Dis/Oriented: Antonioni In China” kicked off at New York’s Asia Society on Sunday, a woman two seats to the right of me pulled out a hard-boiled egg and ate it as sustenance for the long journey ahead. “I wanted to see the film,” the egg eater complained to her friend, explaining why she’d bought a confused ticket without realizing the nature of the event, “but now it’s too late.” I had to wonder how many people had shown up thinking they were going to see the film rather than “a dance theater ‘conversation’ with the […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 18, 2013At the end of introducing their film Detropia at the 9th annual True/False Film Festival in Columbia, Mo., Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady directed compliments for the documentary festival at their peers. “It’s so great to hang out with all you filmmakers outside the environment of Sundance,” they noted, “which is kind of a pressure cooker.” SXSW got invoked even more; Janet Pierson’s name was frequently mentioned over the four days as directors swapped notes over their next stop there. It’s clear that True/False’s boons for festival-circuit-weary press and directors alike include the lack of film-affiliated publicists, barely visible industry […]
by Vadim Rizov on Apr 17, 2012