One of several good reasons in this faux-indie era to admire Minnesota-based filmmaker Christine Kunewa Walker: “ I don’t make films because I think they’re going to be blockbusters,” says the producer of Backroads, American Splendor, Factotum, and the new Older Than America, leaving no doubt that it’s true. “ I try to make films that speak to me, and I try to make them on a budget, so we can get our money back. But it starts with the content–always. I can never think about whether a movie is going to make a lot of money. Anyone who’s concerned with that should be working in Hollywood.”

It’s a day before the Oscars, and Walker–who did her name proud by coming to our interview at Java Jack’s on her own two feet–is prepping to debut Older Than America on opening night of the “ Women With Vision” festival before taking it down to the ever-hipper South by Southwest. In other words, her commitment to Minnesota is genuine. Walker produced Older Than America–about a Native American woman’s struggle to come to terms with a legacy of abuse–for just over a million dollars on the Fond du Lac Reservation of northern Minnesota, booking the entire 50-member crew at the Black Bear Casino Resort for the month-long shoot. First-time director Georgina Lightning, who co-wrote the movie with Walker, had planned to film in Idaho or California, but heeded her producer’s suggestion to make America here, and since then has decided to stay–because she loves Minnesota or Walker, either of which would be understandable.

Q: Does this project mark your return to the territory of Backroads?

A: Making this film really reminded me of the challenges and rewards of independent movies. When you’re working with the Native American community, a community that has dealt with oppression and victimization, and you’re telling their stories, there’s naturally a great deal of sensitivity involved. For instance, there are many [Native] people who feel it’s not appropriate to show sacred ceremonies such as the Sundance onscreen. As a producer, you want to be the person to deal with those sensitivities in the best possible way. But you are also dealing with the realities of independent filmmaking: not enough money, not enough time. You’re struggling to get material on film–or tape, in this case. And when someone says, “ I’m not sure if we should use this phrase for the Sundance scene,” or “ I’m not sure I’m comfortable with your shooting the Sundance scene,” and you’ve got a whole cast and crew lined up to shoot that scene the very next day, and you have to stop everything and smooth over whatever issues there are, then it’s a challenge, you know? So that’s why I’m there. I consider myself a person who understands those difficulties and considers it important. But then there’s also the producer side of me that says, “ We’ve got to get this thing in the can!” We had some of those same issues with Backroads.

Q: On Older Than America, you were also working as co-writer–so you would’ve been in the perfect position to address both the artistic side and the production side, the creative and the practical.

A: Yes, but let me qualify that a bit. The story really came from the director, Georgina Lightning. I was just the person who helped facilitate it. Georgina had met with a number of writers and tried to work with them, and there was some push and pull with regard to how the story should be told. After a few years of that, we both sat down and said, “ Why don’t we just try to tackle this together?” Working on this project, it was very important for me to facilitate whatever vision Georgina had for the film. And I think at the end of the day she’s really happy with what she could accomplish with the movie, and that makes me feel like I did my job well as a producer and co-writer.

Q: What was it about Georgina and her work that allowed you as both producer and co-writer to trust her so completely?

A: I had met Georgina working on Backroads. She was an actor in the movie–as she is in this movie. I had admired her work as an actor and over the years I had gotten to know her more as a friend and as someone who’s working and struggling in the industry. We had long conversations in which she expressed her philosophy of her work, what she’s trying to achieve in this business, what stories she wants to tell. So when she asked me to get involved in a project, I was really excited. I thought about the lessons I had learned on Backroads, and I thought I could bring some experience to the table. I also decided that I had to trust her completely. I respected her work and I liked her as a person, but who knows? She’s a first-time director, and there are no guarantees with first-time directors–absolutely none. I had to take a leap of faith–to trust in her vision, to get her the resources she needed, and then see what would happen. I tried never to second-guess her–which felt like the right thing to do especially because this wasn’t my story. I knew nothing about Native American boarding schools before I got involved with this project. So who am I to tell her how to make this story?

Q: And this project also brings you back to the Walker, with which you have a long history.

A: Yes. I was a publicist at the Walker for years. But the other thing in relation to this project and the Walker is that I worked many years ago on a program with a Native American director named Victor Masayesva. The Walker was trying to get cameras into the hands of Native American youth. The campaign was: “ Okay, there has been a distrust of the mainstream media within the Native American community because of the way the community has been portrayed by non-Native journalists and filmmakers. And so in order for us to change this, we have to take control of the medium and use the technology to tell our own stories.” I was very excited about that campaign. It changed my whole way of thinking about directors and filmmaking. Older Than America brought back that same excitement: being in a position as a producer to empower a community that didn’t have many champions in the media. In my other films, I may have had a bigger role in saying, “ Oh, well, you need to do it this way.” On this film, I just wanted to give Georgina the benefit of my experience, to let that work for her. I didn’t want to become another authority figure to the community, telling them how to represent themselves. I never want to be that. On Backroads, I think the director felt I was playing that role. And it was painful–very discouraging and disappointing. This was my chance to try again and make it work.

Q: How did the project get started?

A: Georgina and I actually started by shooting the trailer for the movie in Idaho about four years ago. She was based in Los Angeles at the time. Georgina and another woman had started a company called Tribal Alliance Productions. That company’s mission statement is about creating media that matters, but also about creating opportunities for Native and indigenous filmmakers. I agree with that mission wholeheartedly, so we started working together. When we did the trailer, Georgina hadn’t yet figured out what form the story would take: She knew she wanted to tell a kind of suspense story, a drama that had something to do with a Native American boarding school. We had another director attached to the project at that time. But it became apparent to me that he was trying to facilitate her vision, and the truth of the matter–I tell this to everybody–is that you cannot direct a movie from the producer’s chair. It always fails miserably. So I talked to Georgina and said, “ Look, we’re struggling to try to tell your story, we’re bringing in writers, we brought in a director, but there’s conflict and there doesn’t need to be, because it’s your story. Why don’t you just write this thing and direct it? What’s the problem?” She needed someone to tell her that, to say, “ You can do this.” More than that: “ You have to do this. Or else it’s going to be a disaster.” No one else could do it but her.

Q: Did you and Georgina always want to shoot in Minnesota?

A: Oh, no. At first we took the trailer and a story idea to the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, which is a casino tribe in California. We raised some money from them–enough to go out and develop the project further, write a script, assemble a team, do some location scouting, come up with a budget, and start casting–mostly Native American actors at that time. In the course of writing the script, we realized we were going to need more money–more than a million dollars. So we went back to our executive producer, Audrey Martinez. She put in the rest of the money. The financing came from people who’d had a prior relationship with Georgina, who also believed in her, and wanted to give her a shot. In the end we shot in northern Minnesota, near the end of 2006. It was colder than crap. We had thought of shooting in Idaho. But when I started looking at the budget and thinking about what our resources would be, I asked Georgina to come and take a look at Minnesota as a possible location. When she started learning about the history of the tribes in Minnesota, about the Dakota Conflict and so on, and when she started meeting people in the Native American community who are affected by the boarding school experience, she came to the conclusion that there was no other place to make the film. And creatively speaking, the northern Minnesota locations worked so beautifully for the look of the film. The Fond du Lac Reservation embraced us with open arms. They gave us so much support.

Q: What does it mean for you and Georgina to be in “ Women With Vision”?

A: It’s really exciting for us. We had to think about it before committing, because the screening is actually before our festival run, and festivals want to have the world premiere. But when [Walker film/video curator] Sheryl Mousley came to us and asked if she could open the festival with our film, we had to think about it–just for a little while. It’s really such a great first screening for us. Georgina is definitely a woman with vision–a creative vision, but also a vision of something bigger. My view of female directors in the industry is that they have to be entrepreneurial–sadly so, in a way. You can’t just have a creative vision as a woman in this industry; you have to have a larger vision for your career. It’s not a given that if you make a good movie and get an agent, then your next film will get a green light right away. When you look at Tamara Jenkins, nominated for an Academy Award for writing The Savages, the last film she made [Slums of Beverly Hills] was 10 years ago–and it was well-regarded, well-received on the festival circuit. What I like about Georgina’s approach to this is that she set up a company, brought her own financing, and made connections in various communities that would help support her. For her, that’s just part of the way she thinks. Me, I’m a producer, so I’m entrepreneurial anyway–it’s not that big a leap for me. But all creative women need to think along these lines. They need to be very strategic. It’s a lot of work, no doubt about it. But making movies is hard anyway!

Q: To the extent that Older Than America is about the negotiation between mainstream culture and indigenous culture, between men and women, between haves and have-nots, between Minnesota and the rest of the world, I’m guessing you must’ve thrived on the fact that the making of the film was a mirror of the story of the film. True?

A: Yes! But imagine the challenge–just the writing challenge for starters. Georgina came to me and said, “ I want to tell a story about a mayor and a Catholic priest and a Native American woman and a boarding school, but I want it to be modern, and I want to represent the past.”

Q: Just like as a producer you want to appeal to an understandably sensitive community and at the same time reach out to a larger audience, right?

A: Right. It was as if we had set out to make it really hard, almost impossible. Negotiation is a good word for it. We were walking a fine line–negotiating our positions in the world. That’s what Native Americans have to do every minute of every day: negotiate for a tiny slice of power. The question is always, “ How to go about it? Do you work within the system or outside it?” The answer is different for everybody. Ultimately, Georgina’s answer was, “ We need to go back to a time before our customs and traditions were taken away, before we were told that we weren’t good enough.”

Q: Hence the title Older Than America?

A: Right. We have to reclaim that which was lost to us. Then we can move forward on an even playing field. It’s funny because it was almost like we had the title of the film before the story–like we had built the story around the idea of this title, Older Than America.

Q: The story works so well on an allegorical level–the idea of a Native American woman being hospitalized by white culture for having visions of the past. The mainstream culture is trying to treat these symptoms with medicine, as if they can be separated from the whole history of oppression of Native people, as if those visions of hers are not a product of that horrible legacy. But in the movie it’s never predictable or didactic. There’s great humor for example in that scene where the woman doctor sends the male cop out to get her coffee and a bagel–a funny twist on that burden of negotiating for tiny slices of power. In addition to all those other challenges you set for yourselves, were you also setting out to play with expectations of a politically correct movie?

A: I think so, yes. Traditionally in Native American culture there’s what you call the Voice of the Res–this all-knowing, perfect spirit. I like the idea of having our male hero get to the point of questioning who he is and finally saying, “ You know, maybe I’m not the voice of the res.” And he’s not, because he sold out way back when. That was a little nod of ours to the stereotype of the all-knowing, visionary Native American voice.

Q: That reminds me to say that the movie is so well acted. You can see that the director brought her personal experience to the film, clearly. But her experience as an actor must’ve helped too, right?

A: For sure. In addition to being an actor, Georgina has also worked as an acting coach–on the set of Smoke Signals, for example. And she has three children who are actors. That gets back to your question about how I was able to trust her with this: I knew that she had a firm handle on the acting piece of it, which was so important.

Q: Can we talk about Sundance?

A: Sure. For me, when people raise that question, the answer I give goes back to that experience at the Walker with Victor Masayesva. None of us involved with Older Than America could ever identify anything explicit in Native American culture that said you couldn’t represent these sacred Sundance ceremonies in art. I mean, you do see them depicted in painting and in literature. So why not film? I would ask tribal elders whether there’s something in Native culture that says this depiction would be damaging. And nobody could answer us. So we didn’t feel like we were violating sacred law. If other artists can use their mediums to depict these things, why can’t a filmmaker? On top of that, Georgina is a Native American director who’s very connected to these ceremonies. If she can’t depict these things on film, then who can?

Q: What do you think it is about film as a medium that lends to this apparent double standard? Is it because film is so tied to entertainment–as well as exploitation?

A: It could be that. It’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve fully answered it for myself. I do think part of the discomfort comes from the fact that in film there’s no control over the image. When you have a painting, you can put it in a gallery in a certain place and you can know who’s coming in to see it; on some level you can control the circumstances of how it’s received. You can set the context. But a film can have a mass audience of people watching in a wide variety of unknown situations–at home on a DVD with popcorn, in between episodes of American Idol or whatever. One interesting thing is that the images I found of the Sundance ceremony were on the Internet–which is uncontrolled, too, although I suppose you could argue that a context is created through the website and what else is on it. I think the difficulty we had with this issue speaks to the overall distrust of the media by Native Americans, which is not at all unfounded. Hollywood, for example, has a long tradition of using film to mock us, to alter the historical record. I respect those who say they don’t want anything to do with that tradition. Georgina is much more adamant in saying, “ Look, this is my story, this is my art form, and I’m going to do this. And if you don’t like it, well, that’s your opinion.”

Q: You could say she’s going forward at the same time that she’s going back?

A: Yeah!

Q: Here’s a funny thing: When I was asking earlier if we could talk about “ Sundance,” I was actually referring to the festival! I’m glad you thought I was asking about the Sundance ceremony, because your answer was so interesting. What I meant to ask was about the fact that you’re starting your festival run of this film at South by Southwest. And that’s unusual for you, right?

A: Oh! That is funny! Yes, we’re at South by Southwest this time, and it’s great. That’s a perfect venue for us, and the timing worked out perfectly in terms of our post-production schedule. Matt Dentler at South by Southwest was so enthusiastic about the movie. I sent him a DVD right after we finished the movie. He watched it on a Sunday, and he e-mailed me that night and said, “ Let’s talk right away.” We talked and he said he wanted Older Than America to be the first film that he booked for the festival. He loved it. His support really made us feel that we were where we were meant to be.

Q: And what about your next project–the one that you’re shooting here in the spring?

A: Well, it’s a comedy called Nobody, written by Rob Perez, who wrote 40 Days and 40 Nights. It stars Sam Rosen, who’s from [Minnesota], but now lives in New York. We’ll start shooting in May. It’s not about murder and mayhem on the reservation, and it’s not about losers. It’s a blatant comedy, very different from what I’m used to doing. I was intrigued by the script. It’s a new challenge for me.

Q: That reminds me: The quote of yours that I like the best from our past interviews is the one from when we met at Sundance to talk about Factotum. I asked whether it was a coincidence that Factotum and American Splendor were both about curmudgeonly artists. You said, “ In one way, it’s a total coincidence. But in another way, I know that I like movies about underdogs–people who aren’t necessarily understood, people who are fighting some kind of battle with themselves or society. I’m really not that interested in likable characters. I prefer unsympathetic characters who manage to redeem themselves.” So does that apply to Nobody?

A: Very much so!

Taken from the like-titled American pop tune of 1959 (“ Who will kiss you, hold you tight?”), the name of Piotr Uklanski’s 2006 feature Summer Love could conjure any number of daydream images, but not likely those with which the Polish artist begins his gloriously perverse neo-Western. On a rocky beach strewn with dead and dying cowboys, the so-called Wanted Man–aptly played in Uklanski’s low-budget film by a sought-after Hollywood star–is introduced by a cast credit that is as final as they come: “ …and Val Kilmer.” Andy Williams croons, “ Will you walk along the beach/Like we did last summer?” Alas, no: The movie is less than five minutes old and Kilmer’s fly-ridden Wanted Man is already gone, baby, gone.

Uklanski, whose intermittently mesmerizing and hilarious film runs twice more (Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.) as part of the Walker’s “ Expanding the Frame,” spoke after the first screening on January 12. “ I wanted to keep the focus of the film on the concept of dislocation–a Western in Poland,” he explained. “ The plot is clichéd and the characters are iconographic–empty, if you will.” We will, indeed. Near the end of the Q&A, an audience member leadingly asks Uklanski, “ The American actor doesn’t talk at all in the movie, does he?” The director, coolly dressed in shades of black, replies as if channeling Eastwood’s Man With No Name and Few Words. “ No. He’s dead. Yeah.”

Uklanski’s humor may be dry in the extreme, but his movie is verily awash in fluids–vomit, spittle, blood, rain, booze, tears, and piss. As befits the setting in post-Communist southern Poland, the elemental is all: “ Town” here is but a trio of old wooden shacks at the edge of a disarmingly motionless lake. (The title card’s “ S” appears as a dollar sign on a coin that spins but briefly before falling dead. Ka-chung.) In the absence of heroes, our heroine is a busty, redheaded barmaid (Katarzyna Ficura) to whom the guys–those few left alive, that is–blow halfhearted kisses and flash their lewdly wiggling tongues. Kinky, too, is the barebones ESL dialogue. “ You know what dat means,” the town sheriff (Boguslaw Linda) says to his makeshift posse, pointing at a rock. “ Absolutely nothing.” And then the punchline. “ But you did not know that.”

Pointedly plotless, Summer Love, to its credit, isn’t a movie for those who expect or demand “ narrative” and the like. (“ The story wanders aimlessly,” the Strib‘s critic complains in a review that wanders aimlessly itself.) Shots from the POV of the Wanted Man’s lifeless eye are tinted red–not for blood, but the sliced tomatoes that some other tough guy pressed into the dead man’s sockets. What is this–The Assassination of Val Kilmer by the Coward Piotr Uklanski?

Maybe so–or else it’s $3.10 to Nowhere, the great adventure of capitalism sans cash. Deadpan to the end, the director makes his Hollywood casting coup sound effortless, as if he didn’t even need to cover the star’s airfare. “ He was in Russia, and Poland is on the way,” Uklanski says of Kilmer–who, in a more justly lawless industry, would get at least an Oscar nomination for his trouble.

Amazingly, Summer Love isn’t the “ Expanding” series’s only Eastern European film that playfully critiques U.S. hegemony in part by borrowing its ironic title from an American pop song(!). California Dreamin’ (February 8 at 7:30 p.m.), a Cannes award-winner and key installment in the Romanian New Wave, follows a Romanian station manager (Razvan Vasilescu) who concocts a 3:10 to Yuma-worthy eye-for-an-eye plot to delay an American NATO train en route to Kosovo. Prater, to my knowledge, isn’t also the name of an old Top 40 tune, but this Ulrike Ottinger documentary about the titular Viennese amusement park (screening February 22 at 7:30 p.m.) takes an alternately wistful and skeptical glance at the culture of escapism. Like the other Ottinger films in the “ Frame” series, Prater is a movie recommended strongly to anyone who wouldn’t rather be taking that new East-is-West rollercoaster ride known as Rambo.

No offense to the Sundance Film Festival (really, I love Sundance!), but Minnesota-based indie-lovers needn’t brave the countless elements in Park City this month to find alt-cinema of the stimulating variety. Me, with a plane ticket to Utah in hand and a press pass awaiting, I’m honestly half-tempted to cancel this year’s trip in favor of “ Expanding the Frame,” the Walker’s homegrown, far-flung, month-long survey of big-screen mold-breaking, which kicks off January 12 with Polish artist Piotr Uklanski’s neo-Communist oater Summer Love–not at Sundance, as you may have guessed.

What should I do? The Park City High School venue known as the Eccles Theatre has the U.S. premiere of recent Walker guest Michel Gondry‘s Be Kind Rewind on January 20, and I’ll likely be there (even though Gondry’s movie opens a mere five days later). But when else will I get to see the newly restored and evidently tantalizing shorts of the late Factory worker and Warhol intimate Danny Williams if not at the Walker on, uh, January 20? And unless you were at the 07 Sundance, where marathon woman (and Walker vet) Jennifer Fox’s six-hour Flying first soared, wouldn’t you do just about anything to catch it at “ Expanding the Frame” over a two-day stretch or on one long Sunday?

These merely scratch the surface of “ Frame,” which also offers a triple dose of the Romanian New Wave–including the area premiere of Cristian Mungiu’s Palme d’Or-winning 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days (January 30), a well-timed antidote to the American “ shmashmortion” genre–along with a four-pack of scarcely seen features by German experimentalist Ulrike Ottinger (February 22-24) and, well, more.

While I wrestle with this excruciating decision, be kind and rewind with me to 1966, a year of burnouts and accidents, when Williams tragically disappeared in Massachusetts after having at least illuminated and quite possibly masterminded the Factory’s landmark Exploding Plastic Inevitable trips with the Velvet Underground. Whatever happened to the young filmmaker and “ Harvard electrician,” and, alas, it remains a mystery even after his niece Esther B. Robinson’s thoroughly detailed documentary investigation A Walk Into the Sea (January 18-20), Williams was clearly another casualty of Factory life.

If Edie Sedgwick has been the poor little poster girl for Factory fallout to the frequent exclusion of Williams and others, even in the four long hours of Ric Burns’s recent PBS study of the scene, Robinson’s film endeavors to expand the frame. And if Warhol has been principally credited with conceiving the mid-60s flood of flamboyantly experimental New York shorts, A Walk Into the Sea–along with Mary Jordan’s similarly intentioned Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis–makes plain that collaboration not only abounded, but that it was rather ruthlessly unacknowledged by Factory bosses eager to share ideas if not intellectual property. We’re encouraged to forgive our great American artists their abundant failures as human beings, but how much? Certainly Warhol wasn’t known by the half-charmed, half-vampiric nickname of Drella for nothing. And the painstaking surreality of Williams’s “ Factory” (excerpted in Robinson’s doc), whose precise rhythms were created not on a flatbed, but in the camera, hardly fails to assert the young artist’s innovations.

Partly through her canny use of otherworldly music, Robinson, a St. Paul native who’ll return to Minnesota for the Walker screenings, helps give her late uncle’s “ Factory” the eerie power of a secret diary. Even with the sound off, it’s no stretch to see Williams’s stroboscopic images of Drella and his soup cans as spooky if not downright threatening. The hypnotically arresting force of these black and white pictures, the near-subliminal sense they give of holding revelations in their grain like seeds in soil, is such that we scan even the scratchy, pen-marked tails of the Williams reels for clues. If I’m haunted enough by these materials to consider staying in Minneapolis until at least the 21st, I can only guess what they must mean to Robinson.

In a recent roundup of Mexican movies on DVD, Village Voice critic J. Hoberman began by asking if cine Mexicano predates the likes of Del Toro, Iñrritu, and Cuarn. Obviously the question was rhetorical–and satirical as well. Here’s another in the same vein: Do Mexican cineastas need global distribution and Oscar nominations to be considered nuevo?

Put it this way: If you say the French New Wave is Godard, Truffaut, and Resnais, you’re only missing–to name a few–Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, Demy, and Eustache. Surely there’s room in world cinema–if not around Charlie Rose‘s cozy table–for a few more young Mexican directors. Señoras y señores, meet Francisco Vargas, Daniel Gruener, and Gerardo Naranjo.

Vargas, who’ll introduce his debut feature The Violin at the Walker on November 16, cites Luis Buñuel‘s 1950 masterpiece Los Olvidados (The Forgotten Ones) as his inspiration to explore an “ ignored reality in Mexico.” Accordingly, the Walker’s nod to lesser-known Mexican directors at the start of its “ Cinemateca” series of Latin American film might owe something to the U.S. acclaim of Babel–whose maker Alejandro Gonzlez Iñrritu famously took the occasion of his Golden Globe award to remind California’s governing terminator of other olvidados, joking, “ I swear I have my papers in order.” If Nuevo Cine Mexicano is about using one’s tools, podium included, to help those less fortunate, Vargas’s Violin could be considered the movement’s theme song: The titular instrument miraculously allows its player to disarm the military oppressors of a Mexican village while bolstering the peasant revolucionarios.

Based on the heroic adventures of activist musician Carlos Prieto, The Violin is set in the 1970s, although the film’s ingenuity extends to capturing the mood of polarized Mexico in the months before the contested election of conservative president Felipe Caldern. Just weeks before the movie’s premiere at Cannes in May of 2006, some 200 protesting farmers were arrested in the brutal crackdown of San Salvador Atenco near Mexico City. Lacking violins, some family members of those jailed in the conflict performed Christmas pastorelas at Santiaguito Prison in order to gain permission to visit loved ones. As reported in Counterpunch, the relatives, costumed as Biblical figures, were subjected to body cavity searches (even the “ Virgin Mary” was ravaged)–though, once inside the prison, the “ three wise men” and company did manage to fire off a round of “Presos Politicos Libertad!”

Guillermo Del Toro, whose Pan’s Labyrinth dramatizes the war of fanciful artistry against everyday oppression, hardly minced words himself when, in answer to Rose’s one and only question about Mexican authorial identity in an hour-long broadcast, claimed, his blue eye gleaming on PBS, “ One thing we [Nuevo Cine filmmakers] all share is a distrust of institutions.” S, though the “ Cinemateca” films express more than skepticism. Gruener’s Never on a Sunday (screening Friday)–wherein a Mexico City man’s dead uncle gets sold for scrap to a medical school–employs a distinctly Day of the Dead-ish style of black humor to do away with the notion of proper burial. “ This is a country that smiles at death,” Gruener told critic Michael Guillén. “ Mexicans know they won’t avoid it by ignoring it.” Death becomes the Nuevo Cine. Gruener is currently prepping a Mexican film of Frankenstein; Del Toro’s next feature is–no surprise here–Hellboy 2.

Before threatening humanity’s extinction in Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarn snuck a few Day of the Dead sugar skulls into the Honeydukes candy store for his Harry Potter episode in 2004. Not to say that the Grim Reaper has only just arrived on the Mexican set. Indeed, scholar Michael Chanan has traced the history of tragic melodrama in Mexican cinema all the way back to 1919′s Santa, in which a provincial innocent is forced into prostitution before meeting her maker. Some 90 years on, the teen whore Tigrillo in Naranjo‘s amped-up, downbeat Drama/Mex (screening November 9) distracts an Acapulco office worker from suicide–only because she reminds him of his own young daughter, with whom he has been having an affair.

Albeit woven tapestry-style a la Iñrritu, Naranjo’s narrative plays like a demolition of Babel with its towering perspective on what it takes to cure the world’s ills, one hanky at a time. As Slant‘s Paul Schrodt has pointed out, the film’s key line is “ Stop being so international”–Naranjo’s way of saying that Drama/Mex has enough soap opera to deal with on its own shores. Where the so-called three amigos of Nuevo Cine merely distrust convention, their younger hermanos intend to derail it. Indeed, Cuarn’s Y tu mam también might look like Three’s Company once Naranjo unsheathes his own teen-sex opus, teased in indieWIRE as “ my hate letter to the people who made me suffer when I was a kid.” Mams , lock up your muchachas.

The power to hypnotize an audience is among the filmmaker’s most rare and valuable gifts. Béla Tarr has it: His images seem to lodge themselves in the same part of the brain where the faintest memories of old dreams are stored. Watching the Hungarian master’s latest film, The Man from London, I found I had lost all track of time, along with the most rudimentary comprehension of plot, character, and theme–those things that are far too clear in conventional cinema, and stubbornly elusive in one’s subconscious. Writing from Cannes, J. Hoberman joked that Tarr’s noir about a railroad worker’s discovery of stolen cash was a “ shoo-in for the Palme d’Ormez-vous”: Indeed, the Cannes critic sitting beside me at the first press screening was one of many who nodded off within an hour.

Here’s the funny thing: Roused by the shuffle of feet at film’s end, the sleepy reviewer asked me what she had missed–and though I’d been awake (or “ awake”) throughout, I couldn’t begin to say. I was embarrassed, but only for as long as it took me to realize that there’s no shame in falling under an artist’s spell. Does the patient feel ashamed of surrendering to the sway of a hypnotist’s pocket watch?

Neither Tarr nor his interviewer Howard Feinstein spoke of altered states during their Regis Dialogue at the Walker last Friday night, held as a prologue to the nine-film retrospective that spans from the director’s Cassavetes-esque Family Nest (screening September 21) to The Man from London (October 20-21). For one thing, there was plenty else for the pair to discuss–including the director’s fierce opposition to the error-laden IMDB (“ a piece of shit,” per Tarr) as well as standard filmmaking (“ full of lies, bad actors, stupid stories, and terrible actors”). For another, the 52-year-old Tarr, whose contrary demeanor on stage hardly detracted from his charm, prefers to see his work as realist rather than dreamy. More than once during the dialogue he proclaimed his fidelity to “ psychological continuity” and “ authentic human emotions”–loneliness and the struggle for dignity being key among them. Focusing often in his films on economic hardship, the director views his aesthetic approach as a moral one, informed as it is in the real world by the state subsidy of his Hungarian productions. Albeit rarified, Tarr’s cinema is for the People; acclaimed or not, he certainly doesn’t make his movies for critics. “ The biggest danger for me is someone telling me I’m an artist,” he told Feinstein, who was in no position to protect him.

Tarr shoots mostly in black and white, and at showtime on Friday he appears dressed accordingly–in a black leather jacket, black jeans, and black boots, his hair in a silver ponytail as if for cinematographic contrast. He scarcely resembles the grim-faced unfortunates lined up for bread in the five-minute “ Prologue” (2004), the one-take Tarr short with which Feinstein aptly began the evening. Which isn’t to say the director comes across as even-tempered. “ Watch the movie again,” he instructs the interviewer, who had dared to call the patriarch of Family Nest “ domineering.” “ I never judge him,” Tarr insists.

Bleak as they are, Tarr’s films hardly lack for a sense of humor–not even the monumental Stntang (October 13), which allegorizes the end of Communism in a mere 450 minutes, including a pub scene to rival the black-comic miserabilism of Aki Kaurismki. Tarr, too, is funny. Tracing the evolution of his worldview (one easily observed in the nearly chronological retro), the director reports having moved from a social to an ontological perspective on human suffering before eventually deciding “ the shit is cosmic–really huge.”

Just how huge the shit, though, became a matter of debate in the evening’s most playful–and revealing–exchange. After screening the astounding sequence in Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies (October 6 and 12) wherein an angry mob trashes a hospital, encounters an old man standing naked against a wall, and then silently retreats, Feinstein confesses that the scene has repeatedly moved him to tears for its poetic rendering of the potential for compassionate change. The director, committing what the late Susan Sontag might’ve deemed another of Tarr’s “ heroic violations,” hilariously begs to differ. “ They hit a wall,” he says of the mob’s sudden about-face. Feinstein doesn’t miss a beat. “ So that mournful music [on the soundtrack] is there because of a wall?”

In a mirror image of his mob, Tarr–recognizing the human condition, perhaps–swiftly changes course. “ You want to destroy everything,” he says from the mob’s perspective. “ But if you meet someone who is already destroyed [like the old man in the scene], you have to stop. I still believe in humanity. I know it’s an illusion, but I want to believe.”

Like all of Tarr’s films since the mid-80s, Werckmeister Harmonies remains generously open to interpretation. Still, can we at least agree that Tarr and Feinstein deserve to share credit not only for a Regis Dialogue, but for…uh…a poetic rendering of the potential for compassionate change?