Film / Video

Apichatpong Weerasethakul was at Walker in November 2004 to present New Language from Thailand
Regis Dialogue: Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Chuck Stephens.

At that time Walker presented regional premieres of his films Sud pralad (Tropical Malady) and Sud Sangeha (Blissfully Yours.)

Lesser known in 2004, especially outside of international cinema circles, this Thai artist has just been awarded the Fine Prize, established by the Fine Foundation, at the Carnegie International exhibition that opened last weekend at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Link to info about the dialogue and Chuck Stephen’s essay printed in the Walker's Regis brochure.

The 26th annual Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival is upon us, and Al Milgrom and his cohorts over at the Minnesota Film Arts offices have put together an impressive slate of films to say the least. It’s daunting to sort through and pick from the 150 or so programs, so for my sake - and yours, I’ve asked some colleagues and friends to pass on their recommendations. Here they are:

Sheryl Mousley, Curator, Film/Video, Walker Art Center

• You the Living (April 18 and 19)
• Momma's Man (April 18 and 20)
• Alexandra (April 22 and 29)
• Up the Yangtze (April 28)

Dean Otto, Assistant Curator, Film/Video, Walker Art Center

• And Along Come Tourists (Saturday, April 19)
• Still Life (Sunday, April 20)
• Irina Palm (April 21 and 25)
• The Way I Spent the End of the World (April 21)
• Woman on the Beach (April 21)
• Red Elvis (April 23)
• Dry Season (April 24)
• Patti Smith: Dream of Life (Saturday, April 26)
• The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (April 25 and 27)
• Savage Grace (April 27 and 28)
• Import/Export (April 29 and May 2)

Verena Mund, Women With Vision Program Associate

• All of the bove recommendations, and…
• Yella (April 19 and 25)

Rob Nelson, Film Critic, Walker Blog Contributor

• The Last Mistress (April 27)
• Momma's Man (April 18 and 20)
• Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) (April 26 &27)
• Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome (April 18 screening only)
• Woman on the Beach (April 20 and 21)

Kathie Smith, Flim Critic and blogger extraordinaire

• Little Moth (April 19 and 29)
• Still Life (Sunday, April 20)
• Woman on the Beach (April 20 and 21)
• Alexandra (April 22 and 29)
• You the Living (April 18 and 19)
• Dry Season (April 24)

I’d also like to add a plug for Song Sung Blue (April 26). It was nothing I had expected and completely blew me away.

See you at the movies!

Faces of a Fig Tree (Ichijiku No Kao)
Directed by Kaori Momoi
Saturday, March 15 7:30 pm

This year's festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today's challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I often joke that "A Japanese man prefers a woman he can take down" but in Japan, which has a long history of chauvinism, women--let alone women filmmakers--still have a difficult time in the work place. As proof of that, there is not one female director in the Japanese major movie industry. I feel that now and from now on, with a rooted coed system (where men experience being bested academically by women), young men find it easier to work with and share a respectful relationship with women. As an actress I wrote scripts on set and participated creatively as an actor thinking to become a filmmaker. The time for female filmmakers has only really just begun. I can assure you that from here on out there will be a deluge of women artists.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I think there is a certain something that films express better than other arts such as literature or music. It's something subconscious or intuitive that a living being gives birth to. This instantaneous feeling that emerges from my body keeps me making films.

The world in which the Kadowaki family lives seems at the border of reality and fiction. Their environment appears dominated by fantasy while all the characters are going through intense transformation. What kind of aesthetic and style did you use to enhance this sort of surrealism?

To die, like a television switching off, suddenly causes the picture of daily life to disappear. Consequently, to live, means partaking in daily living. Daily life doesn't contain a lot of big surprises; if we don't look at it through our memories or other people's eyes, it doesn't hit home that we're actually happy. The themes in this film are 'Why can't we feel the happiness we have now' and 'isn't it a let-down not to be able to?" I wanted to show people that calmly eating around the dinner table, if you stop to look at it, is beautiful.

You are well known as an established actress. With Faces of a Fig Tree you directed a film yourself for the first time. Did the experience of directing change your view of acting?

Actors are an entity that neither transform nor perform. I found that I wanted them to lend their talents and become creators on set.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

During filming, I never explained to the actors what scene we were shooting. I wrote the script, but the majority of the time the actors spoke in the scene as a response to my lines and instructions. Then it was a matter of arriving back at the lines from the script.

I like the dining table where the family is eating croquettes after the father has died. The children knew that they were eating at the table after their father's death, but with the mother's line "Your father sure is late tonight" it seems as though they become completely unsure of whether he is even dead anymore and they just continue eating silently. I think of them as children clumsily trying to support their mother, who's grown a little bit funny in the head after the death of her husband, through the mundane daily routine of eating. That's my favorite scene.

Translated from Japanese by Robert Behnen, edited by C. Marran

The Mirroring Cure
Directed by Charlotte Ginsborg
2007, UK, video, 28 minutes
Saturday, March 8, 2:00 pm

Women With Vision is proud to announce that Charlotte Ginsborg is flying in Minneapolis from London this Friday to introduce her film The Mirroring Cure presented March 8 on International Women’s Day. Part of the Short Films, Program One, The Mirroring Cure is a genre mix of documentary and fiction which tries to understand how the employees of a company are affected by the demolishing of an old building and the construction of its replacement.

Operation Filmmaker
Directed by Nina Davenport
Thursday, March 20, 7:00 pm

This year’s festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today’s challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I hesitate to be so blunt, but I do think film is still an extremely sexist industry. Just look at the statistics published each year by the fabulous Guerrilla Girls. They have fantastic billboards, such as one proclaiming, “Even the U.S. Senate is more progressive than Hollywood: Female Senators: 14%, Female Film Directors: 4%” and “The Anatomically Correct Oscar: He’s white & male, just like the guys how win!” Fortunately, things are much better for female documentary filmmakers, probably because the industry is less hierarchical. We don’t need anyone’s go-ahead to start making a film. But even then, you see a kind of sexism in the sensibilities of the festival programmers, a major factor in determining which films succeed and which fail, and also with audiences. And the majority of well-known documentary filmmakers are male.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

I actually began my career as an artist in still photography, specifically black & white street and portrait photography, inspired by photographers such as Diane Arbus and Bruce Davidson. In the photographs I admired most, you could feel the connection between the subject and the photographer and I think that had an enormous affect on my filmmaking. I have been a subject to greater or lesser extents in all my films because I am interested in how people respond to being photographed. I’m also interested in my relationship to the people I film. Needless to say, Operation Filmmaker takes the subject/photographer relationship to an extreme.

Was the production of this film a learning experience for you in terms of documentary ethics and narrative as well as film production?

My film is in fact all about documentary ethics. The conflict that often occurs between a documentary filmmaker and his or her subject is normally kept out of the film, but since I’m an American and had control over the film and Muthana is Iraqi and felt powerless to control the film - and sometimes felt invaded by it - there was an obvious parallel to the American invasion of Iraq. This seemed the perfect set-up to examine an issue that lurks behind the scenes of many documentaries - that they are often made by people with resources about people without resources - which always poses a real moral quandary.

You have a very interesting way of blending the reality and the fiction of war. How do you think the representations of war and its portrayal in the media in particular affect the sense people make of war?

I think the way we sanitize the war in the news makes people more complacent than they would be if, like Al Jazeera, we showed images of dead bodies - or if we let scenes organically unfold and play out, the way they do in documentary, rather than reducing everything to superficial sound bites. I think today’s news media in the U.S. is of appallingly poor quality, it is actually much better in Europe.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

One of my favorite scenes is when Muthana is angry that I tried to set parameters on the idea of getting him a visa to the U.S. and he is so fed up with me, his life, and the documentary, he yells at me, “Fuck you! Fuck Kouross! And fuck David Schisgall!” I just love the idea of the documentary film subject totally rebelling and telling the filmmakers off. At the moment it occurred, I was extremely upset that I was trying to help him and his only response was to be angry, but when I watched the footage later, I found it hilarious. I also love all the scenes from DOOM and how uncanny and surreal it was that Muthana ended up on a multi-million dollar film set that was all about creating an atmosphere of war when he was trying to escape war. Not to mention, all one had to do to see war was turn on the nightly news. But by the time you’ve edited 400 hours down to an hour and a half, you pretty much love every scene that’s managed to successfully avoid the fate of ending up on the cutting room floor.

It Happened Just Before (Kurz davor ist es passiert)
Directed by Anja Salomonowitz
Sunday, March 16, 2:00 pm

This year's festival is subtitled Past/Present and is particularly interested in looking at the ways in which women filmmakers reveal how the past has shaped the present. Would you say today's challenges and obstacles for women filmmakers have changed? And how do you think the situation in your country is in particular when compared to other countries?

I think the situation for woman filmmakers in general is difficult: to be accepted by a man’s world. Here in Austria there are many woman filmmakers but many also claim about the bad conditions.

Why are you a filmmaker and how does working with film help you tell your story?

Making movies was, and is, the only thing I wanted to do. It makes me happy, full, and live worth it. Besides my family :-)

In your film, the testimonies of women who have experienced human trafficking are told by non-actors filmed in their work place and who could have witnessed such tragedy. Why was it important for you to create this kind of mise-en-scene ?

There are three documentary layers in the movie: the stories of the woman are true, the people who tell the stories are amateur actors in their real lives and, most important, the places where it could have happened are real: the border is real, the brothel is real and also the diplomatic household. So these three documentary layers are mixed together and they give something new.

Normally when you see a documentary about trafficking in woman, the woman tells her story and she cries. She has this black thing over her eyes etc. What you feel is that you pity her. I wanted to take away the pity from the woman - and talk about the things they need. They do not need pity, they need to have rights. A different law situation concerning migration as it is now.

So I separated the stories from the woman to give a look on the pure stories themselves. On the conditions that make them happen.

I was certainly concerned with questioning prevalent documentary methods. Does the victim always have to tell their own story? On the other hand, can someone else recite the story but nevertheless still communicate something of the person? I am concerned with this grey area.

Was it difficult to persuade the protagonists to take part in the film? Were they afraid of being connected with human trafficking?

To find the amateur actors was for sure a big part. We made a long street casting to find them. When someone was found, I accompanied them in their all day life for days, months and years.

And then I rehearsed with them very, very much.

The diplomatic woman I asked again before we shot: are you really sure you want to do this? And she said yes. But for sure it was not easy for them.

They had to deal with these stories, to think about them, to connect them with their own life. This was part of our work. But they were not afraid of being connected with human trafficking because they knew they are doing something against it.

How or where did you find the stories of the women?

The stories are based on true stories, on interviews. They come lefö, an ngo in Vienna who works in the field of trafficking woman, and also from women themselves. It was agreed with lefö that the women should not be able to be identified. It deals with real, exemplary narratives from specific areas in which trafficking in women takes place such as where women are sold into prostitution or, for example, where they have to work, effectively as slaves, in diplomatic households.

Could you choose your favorite scene in your film or an anecdote related to it and tell us what you particularly like about it?

I am often asked if the waiter really hurts his head in this scene or if he plays it...yes, he plays it. While I was rehearsing with this people I asked everything very exactly: how do you start work every day, where do you give the ashes etc. While we were doing this he was awkward, he often hurt himself. So I wrote it back in the script and he also had to do it while we shot.

I honestly never thought I would see this happen. For the longest time, the only way to see the work of Frederick Wiseman was via a projected 16mm print. That was certainly the case when we presented a retrospective in conjunction with a Regis Dialogue back in 2003. Cinephiles knew they needed to get here to see the films as catching up with them on video was not an option. Since then, Wiseman’s company, Zipporah Films, began to offer VHS copies of his work for sale to institutions. Even that seemed revolutionary given his long-standing stance on presenting his work on film, protecting himself from lost revenue from bootlegged video copies. I was really excited to see today, on Michael Tully’s blog, that Zipporah has now crossed over to DVDs, offering them for sale not only to institutions, but to individuals as well. Now so many more people will be able to catch up with some of the greatest documentaries ever produced. I count High School and Titicut Follies amongst my favorites, but all of his work is worth checking out.

Just a wee note to keep Walker Film/Video programs on your mind through this Thanksgiving weekend.

First, thanks to all the people who made who turned out to make our last Cinemateca screening of the season, Francisco Vargas' The Violin, such a great success. Although I was unable to attend the screening myself, from what I've heard, Mr. Vargas was quite a crowd pleaser, eliciting some great comments from our friend, Bre Blaesing, a WACTAC member. Cinemateca returns in January with a whole new slate of films so stay tuned for information on that as if becomes available.

In other news, Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's documentary Nanking which screens here at the Walker (as a part of Premieres: First Look series) a week from this Wednesday, November 28, was short listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Sciences (AMPAS) for a Best Documentary Oscar. Also short listed, another amazing documentary we screened at the Walker last spring, The Rape of Europa.

Finally, we are happy to announce another Premieres: First Look screening, this time with close Minnesota ties, Jason Reitman's Juno. Written by former City Pages writer Diablo Cody, the screening will take place December 13^th at 7:30 PM and will be followed by a post-screening discussion with Ms. Cody taking questions from the audience.

Tickets for Nanking (screening November 28 at 7:30 pm) are $12 ($10 for Walker members).

Tickets for Juno go on sale to WALKER MEMBERS on Wednesday November 28 at 11am. Any tickets remaining on December 4 will then be made available to the general public. Tickets are $12 ($10 for Walker Members).

We are thrilled to welcome our friend and colleague Rob Nelson to the Walker Film/Video blog! Rob is a member of the National Society of Film Critics and the recipient of three awards each from the Society of Professional Journalists and the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he has studied film at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has taught film courses at St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota, and has served on film festival juries in Los Angeles, Minneapolis and Vancouver. For five years he was the curator of Get Real: City Pages Documentary Film Festival, which he co-founded with City Pages publisher Mark Bartel in 2001. His writing currently appears in Film Comment, Cinema Scope and Mother Jones, and has been featured in Spin, The Village Voice, The Boston Phoenix, LA Weekly, New York Newsday, and The Independent Film and Video Monthly. In 2005, his reviews of “In the Mood for Love” and “Eyes Wide Shut” were reprinted in The X List (Da Capo Press). He is a regular attendee of the Cannes, New York, Full Frame and Sundance film festivals.

Regis Dialogue honoree Ang Lee once again took the top prize at the Venice Film Festival for his latest film Lust, Caution. Congratulations to Ang Lee, James Schamus (co-writer, procucer), and Minneapolis’ own William Pohlad, whose company, River Road Entertainment co-produced the new film.

Click here to view the Regis Dialogue with Ang Lee and James Schamus.

If Michel Gondry’s recent Regis Dialogue and Retrospective left you wanting more, you only have a few more months left to wait. Gondry’s new film, Be Kind Rewind, starring Jack Black, Mos Def, Mia Farrow, Danny Glover, and Melonie Diaz is slated for limited release on December 21, 2007. (Assuming it will be here, a perfect Christmas Day movie!) The trailer just hit the web and it looks nothing short of hilarious. This will be the second film that Gondry has both written and directed after his 2006 Science of Sleep. Where Science of Sleep was a very personal film for Gondry, Be Kind Rewind seems to be more of a traditional comedy, at least as traditional as Gondry can be. The premise is that Jerry (Jack Black) is magnetized, literally, and as a result ends up erasing the all the video tapes in the Mike’s (Mos Def) video store. Instead of replacing the tapes with new ones, Jerry and Mike decide to personally remake the films (replete with special effects, as seen in photo at left.)

Check out the Be Kind Rewind trailer HERE.

Two more film directors die and I raise my ugly blog-head like the grim reaper. However, in light of last week’s local events it seemed trivial to eulogize two directors. As a result this post comes almost a week after the passing of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, (which is, at this point, not news) but only five days after the shocking collapse of the 35W bridge. Like most people that live in the area, I have spent those last five days trying to wrap my head around the bizarre accident and the surreal photos and testimonials. Understanding the full impact of the bridge collapse will take some time. Understanding the death of two elderly film directors is ultimately easier.

Both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died on Monday, July 30, 2007. Bergman was 89 and Antonioni was 94. Both worked in their later years, but that is where the similarities stop with these two. Ingmar Bergman was possibly one of the most iconic film directors, with his cool Norse intellectualism and preternatural staid symbolism and allegory. Bergman made over forty feature films and over a dozen television productions. Bergman himself admitted that most of his work was autobiographical, drawing upon his own experiences as the son of Lutheran minister. I’m not even going to pretend to understand the impact of his films at the time. Bergman exists to me in the form of VHS tapes, repertory screenings and Criterion Collections. His films have a rare amount of artfulness and unrelenting honesty that make them difficult, even now (or maybe even more so now.) He spent the last ten years of his life living and working in his home on Fårö Island in Sweden. An inexhaustible amount of information can be found on the Ingmar Bergman website published by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation.

I can just imagine film students of the Sixties and Seventies falling into the Bergman camp or the Antonioni camp of film appreciation. Whether or not there is any truth in that, I have no idea, but these filmmakers could not be farther apart in style. If Bergman’s films were grounded in faith (even though he had proclaimed to had lost his), Michelangelo Antonioni’s were grounded in the lack of faith. More than anyone, Antonioni charted the territory of the arthouse film where “nothing happens.” The majority of his thirty-some films remain shamelessly unavailable in the US, but if there is one thing I have learned from purchasing a bootlegged version his 1970 documentary about China (Chung Kuo), Antonioni was not afraid to try new things. Antonioni had an inquisitiveness about the world and the human condition and this translated into his art. Life’s ambiguity was a stage for Antonioni’s visual poetics. Antonioni suffered a stroke in 1985 that left him partially paralyzed, and limited his work. A very thorough biography on Michelangelo Antonioni can be found here on Senses of Cinema.

One can’t help but wonder what these two men would have thought about a shared date of death. They were contemporaries who would have been unable to ignore each other work. Dan Zak’s article in the Sunday Washington Post looks at where the two director’s paths did and didn’t cross. It is ironic that we are plucking quotes like this out: “Antonioni was suffocated by his own tedium, Bergman wrote in his autobiography.” and “Bergman was solely concerned with the question of God, Antonioni told the London Telegraph, whereas he himself was uninterested in unraveling spiritual mystery.” (from the Post article.) Their thoughts about each other will forever be joined together by fate, or, as Antonioni might have seen it, plain old ordinary chance.

Both will be missed, but their films live on.

Edward Yang, award winning Taiwanese director, died today from complications from colon cancer. Best known for his film Yi Yi (A One and a Two…) 2000, which won best director at the Cannes Film Festival, Yang was a member of the so-called Taiwanese New New Wave film movement along with Ang Lee and Hou Hsiao-hsien. Yang was born in Shanghai, but moved to Taiwan during the civil war and later moved to the US to study and become a citizen. His film career however, was firmly embedded in Taiwan, with many of his films unavailable in the US: In Our Time (1982), That Day on the Beach (1983), Taipei Story (1985), The Terrorist (1986), A Brighter Summer Day (1991), A Confucian Confusion (1994), and Mahjong (1996). He is credited for giving Chang Chen (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Three Times) his start in A Brighter Summer Day. He was planning on working with Jackie Chan on an animated feature entitled The Wind. For me, the news in quite shocking. As a director that I feel the world had yet to discover, Mr. Yang will be sorely missed.

The “Father or African Cinema” passed away at age 84 at his home in Dakar, Senegal on Sunday. He came to prominence in the mid-sixties with his first feature, Black Girl, and made nine other features and numerous short films. His most recent film, Moolaadé screened at the Oak Street Cinema in 2005. Ousmane Sembène, his vision of the world, and his unique and dynamic perspective, will be sorely missed in the world’s film community.

See the New York Times Obituary for more information.

We have just added a free preview screening of the new Edith Piaf biopic La Vie En Rose!

Thursday, June 7. 7:30pm. Walker Cinema. FREE!

A swirling, impressionistic portrait of an artist who regretted nothing, writer-director Olivier Dahan's La Vie En Rose stars 2005 Cesar Award-winner Marion Cotillard (A Very Long Engagement, A Good Year) in a blazing performance as the legendary French icon Edith Piaf. Perhaps finding her nearest American analogues in figures such as Billie Holiday and Judy Garland, the world-famous chanteuse lived a tragic life worthy of a novel by Zola or Balzac. From the mean streets of Paris' Belleville district--where she was born into abject poverty and grew up surrounded by street performers, hookers, and pimps--to the dazzling limelight of New York's most famous concert halls, Piaf constantly battled to sing and survive, to live and love. Her magical voice made her a star on both sides of the Atlantic. 2007, color, 35mm, 140 minutes.

Take a look at the trailer below.