Film / Video

Metaphor alert: The Croatian protagonist of All for Free (Sve Džaba), one of the films in the traveling series known as "Global Lens," grieves the violent deaths of his buddies by taking his humanitarian show on the road–rolling his tavern on wheels from town to town and giving away drinks to all comers, young and old.

Alas, All for Free (May 7 at 9 p.m. and May 10 at 7 p.m.) isn't among the Walker's complimentary screenings this year (those are on Thursday nights), but you get my drift: The movie's bartending Goran (Rakan Rushaidat) could be nicknamed Global after the series that, like him, dispenses thirst-quenching culture to those in need.

Established by the Bay Area-based Global Film Initiative in 2002 as a response to the slow decapitation of developing-world cinema in the U.S. (the violent death of a buddy, you might say), "Global Lens" wheels its cart to the Walker this week as part of a year-long tour that has included stops at the Museum of Modern Art and the Seattle International Film Festival, and will continue on to more than a dozen other locations from Palm Springs to Green Bay.

Minneapolis, thanks largely to the M-SPIFF's Al Milgrom and crew, hasn't been nearly as parched as most U.S. cities when it comes to foreign-language film libation from beyond the West, but that doesn't mean All for Free et al. isn't a gift. Indeed, the tight focus of "Lens," with one picture from each of a mere 10 countries, lends far more easily than the mammoth M-SPIFF to thematic extrapolation.

Thus allow me to summarize the views from Croatia, China, India, Iran, Argentina, and the Philippines: "The market for earthenware has crashed!"–or so it is said in Opera Jawa (May 11 at 3 p.m. and May 17 at 9 p.m.), justly hailed in January by the Village Voice's soon-to-be-former film critic Nathan Lee as a "surrealist Indonesian pomo-folkloric/funkadelic musical-slash-avant-garde pop-and-lock revolutionary romance-slash-Hindu song-and-dance-installation art extravaganza" and a "nonpareil Ramayana boogie-down gong drum with a tembang gamelan xylophone huzzah and super-tight moves on the wayang orang tip."

Word yo, what he said–before the market for adjectives crashed, if not that for film crit in all of inkdom. My point here isn't so much to sell you on the notion of wickety-wickety-wordwiggin' Lee as an undeserving victim of new times (takes one to know one, perhaps), but to suggest that the age-old question of hinterland distribution ("How will it play in Peoria?") is relatively easy to answer these days, what with the market being both global and glum. Ye olde boogie-down gong drum could well beat even in Palm Springs–or anywhere an American can barely afford a "Global" ticket when they're not being given away. (Now's the time to mention that the Chinese Luxury Car is free at the Walker on May 8; the ride will cost you on May 18.)

The title character of El Custodio (May 9 at 7 p.m. and May 14 at 7 p.m.) is fortunate enough to be gainfully employed–as bodyguard to a well-off politician. But he's also an outsider, as ingeniously articulated by director Rodrigo Moreno in a film-long succession of shots that place the custodian on the periphery of the inner circle, away from the conversation. Taxi driver Travis Bickle would recognize him immediately as God's lonely man, if you catch my meaning. Yet Moreno's mapping of the separation between have and have-not remains cinematic not in terms of auteurist allusion (Godard and Scorsese can keep their trademark Alka-Seltzer zooms), but of spatial relationships in the frame and on the soundtrack. When the custodian eventually bridges those gaps, the moment–albeit rough–comes as a relief. (Well, sorta.)

More notes from underground: The Bet Collector (May 10 at 9 p.m. and May 16 at 9 p.m.) makes book on the seedy sides of Manila, where a quickie mart-owning mom must mix with numbers-runners to stay flush. And, though more upbeat than Bet, The Fish Fall in Love (May 11 at 1 p.m. and May 16 at 7 p.m.), from Iranian director Ali Raffi, finds another businesswoman forced into dirty work–cooking for the former flame who would extinguish her restaurant.

That both Fish Fall and Bet Collector are screening free for students (on the mornings of May 16 and 14, respectively) proves the worthy investment of "Global Lens" in cross-cultural education. But the series, to its credit, doesn't appear naive about the counterintuitive challenges of giving goodness away for nothing. Goran's very first customer in All for Free is a Croatian grade-schooler who, when offered juice at no charge, laments that the generous bartender doesn't have "the white one" and walks away. Sorry kids, no Speed Racer on this track. But if Luxury Car doesn't rev your motor, I don't know automobiles.

The Global Lens program - ten 35mm feature films - arrived en masse this afternoon. The shipment looked impressive sitting at our loading dock, so I snapped a quick picture to give you a sense of what 10 films can look like. (Technically, this is nine and a half, as half of The Bet Collector was delayed.)

We’ve been hosting the Global Film Initiative’s (GFI) touring film program, Global Lens, since its inception five years ago. For the first time, the GFI has made trailers available for all ten of the films included in their program.

The Kite (Le Cerf-Volant)

All for Free (Sve Džaba)

Luxury Car (Jiang Cheng Xia Ri)

The Custodian (El Custodio)

Kept and Dreamless (Las Mantenidas Sin Sueños)

Let the Wind Blow (Hava Aney Dey)

The Bet Collector (Kubrador)

The Fish Fall in Love (Mahiha Ashegh Mishavand)

Opera Jawa

Bunny Chow

Accompanying Errol Morris on his visit next Tuesday to the Walker (no tickets remain) is Nubar Alexanian, who began working with Morris 15 years ago as his behind-the-scenes photographer. While Morris is here to introduce and discuss his new film, Standard Operating Procedure, Alexanian’s own work sees the light of a day in Nonfiction ($60; Walker Creek Press), a book of photography from Morris’ film sets.

Morris and Alexanian, who is also part of Tuesday’s talk, consider this book a “collaboration” between a documentary photographer and a filmmaker who tries getting at truth through reenacted stories. The book is designed to to leave viewers wondering about the lines separating fact and fiction. Nonfiction includes photographs from the sets of Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter Jr., the First Person series, and Morris' new film, which examines the events surrounding the torture carried out by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison. The Walker Art Lab is showing 11 of these photos Tuesday night, and the book goes on sale today in the Walker shop.

This is the fifth book of documentary photography for Alexanian, whose subjects vary from the culture and people of Andean Peru (Stones in the Road emerged after Alexanian spent 11 years travelling to South America) to the inspirations of some of the world's greatest musicians (Where Music Comes From ).

IMAGES: (top) “A prisoner being dragged from his cell”; (middle) "Waterboarding and electric shock"; (bottom) "Hooded prisoner on a box," photographs by Nubar Alexanian, from the film Standard Operating Procedure and Alexanian’s new book, Nonfiction.

When Miloš Forman arrives here on April 12 for his sold-out Regis Dialogue with L.A.-based critic Scott Foundas, the 75-year-old filmmaker deserves to be greeted like a rock star, his fans scrambling for autographs, shouting out requests ("Rock me, Amadeus!"), and perhaps even flicking their Bics until the Walker's fire alarm goes off.

I don't say this because Forman directed a valiantly recovering Courtney Love in 1996's The People vs. Larry Flynt, or because R.E.M. helped inspire his Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon a few years later, or because in the times-they-are-a-changin'-back days of '79 he let it all hang out with Hair, or because the Czechoslovakia-born filmmaker's well-named U.S. debut Taking Off (1970) sports enough pricey tuneage (by Woodstock vets The Incredible String Band and others) to have indefinitely forestalled a commercial video release anywhere in the world. I don't even say it because the apt title of the Walker's accompanying retro–"Cinema of Resistance"–all but begs us to defy the museum's easy listening vibe ("Freebird!"), like Forman's R.P. McMurphy righteously railing against Nurse Ratched's wretched Muzak in the Cuckoo's Nest.

Rather, I'm thinking of the classic Minneapolitan rock tale–lovingly told by Jim Walsh in the Pioneer Press and well worth repeating here or any other time–wherein the Revolution-era Prince sits alone at the back of the dearly beloved Southtown Theatre several nights in a row, swinging his high heels to the beat of Forman's funky Amadeus (screening in its director's cut edition this Friday, April 4, at the Walker).

That His Royal Badness would just a few months later join the director among 1985's Oscar-winners (Prince's gold came for writing the Purple Rain soundtrack, of course) means our reclusive homeboy might already have serenaded Forman for his vision of a flamboyantly costumed control freak whose musical genius was without equal at the time. But I doubt it. So let us be sure to thank Miloš Forman for rocking the Kid of Purple Rain–along with kids of all colors, really, to the extent that the "Resistance" leader has always been a youthquaking revolutionary.

"I remember seeing Amadeus as a kid and really liking it," says Foundas by phone from L.A. "Particularly for a period film, it has a very contemporary feel. So besides the fact that it's about young people, it's a movie that a kid could easily access."

For another budding critic, it was Hair that first flipped his wig, although, relatively speaking, I was still a pup when I saw Forman in the flesh at the Virgin Megastore, of all places, where he was pimping Larry Flynt in workprint form for the New York Film Festival press screening crowd. “I’m not interested in Hustler,” Forman said of Flynt's rag, “but I am interested in the idea that someone could tell me not to buy it.”

Foundas, who's excited to be encountering Forman (and Minneapolis) for the first time on April 12, says that as interviewer he hopes to explore, among other things, the relationship between the director's life and work.

"His early films," Foundas says of Black Peter (April 1), Loves of a Blonde (April 8), and The Firemen's Ball (April 16), all key works of the Czech New Wave, "clearly reflect the sensibility of someone who grew up under Communism and had an almost Dickensian childhood and adolescence. Given what his life was like, it's amazing that he became a filmmaker rather than a coalminer."

At the age of eight, Forman witnessed his mother being taken away from the family home by Nazis; both she and Forman's father, a teacher, perished in a concentration camp after having been marked for death by a former employee of theirs. Sudden shocks, some matter-of-factly presented, are understandably commonplace in Forman's work. "The Germans just cancelled culture," the director told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994 by way of explaining that, among influences, his childhood itself factors far more significantly than his childhood experience of movies. Disguising his early social critiques under cover of comedy, Forman became an early master of the fine art of smuggling, although Firemen's Ball (1967) allegorized Communism clearly enough to inspire some 40,000 Czechoslovakian firemen to threaten picketing the film–which was summarily banned in his homeland. Ball was the first of Forman's works to screen at the New York Film Festival, which provided a ticket to the U.S. as well as a chance to begin making high-profile American movies–less dissimilar to the scrappy Czech ones than they might appear.

Foundas, who hailed Forman's Goya's Ghosts (April 2) as "irreverent" in LA Weekly, says that comic impiety, along with an outsider's point of view, can be traced across the entire oeuvre.

"Goya's isn't a portrait of the artist so much as the portrait of a society that's constantly reinventing itself as one regime opposes the previous one," the critic says. "So you have this absurd cycle of contradictions seen over the course of a lifetime–which is how the world must look to someone like Forman, who has experienced democracy, Nazism, and Communism. Even [Forman's] Czech films are made from an outsider's perspective, with nonconformist characters rebelling against parents or patriarchal figures. And the [American] biopics are unorthodox as well. Man on the Moon seems to channel the personality of its subject, being both entertaining and enigmatic. It's a movie about Andy Kaufman where you learn as little about Andy Kaufman as Andy Kaufman would probably want you to learn."

The Walker, as if to help preserve the mysteries of both Kaufman and Forman, isn't screening Man on the Moon. Children of the resistance would thus do well to download the bootleg.

Upon winning the Grand Prix at Cannes last year, "Japan's leading woman director"–Naomi Kawase, now in the "spotlight" of the Walker's Women With Vision series–spoke in Buddhist terms of the benefits of difficulty. "You try to find strengths–and I don’t mean money, cars, or clothing," she said. "It’s not necessarily something visible. It can be the wind, the light, the memory of the ancients…"

Nature and ancestry are indeed key elements of Kawase's The Mourning Forest, whose weighty production stumbled a bit en route to the Cannes stage–merely by way of gathering strength, its maker would say. (She'll have more to say about the film when introducing it at 7pm Thursday.) If anything, though, the relation between past and present–the focus of this year's "Vision" program, as it happens–bears even more directly on the filmmaker's little-seen documentaries.

Kawase–still not 40 years of age–had made more than a dozen docs before her first narrative feature, Suzaku, took its own Cannes prize, the Camera d'Or, in 1997. Since then, she has made a half-dozen more nonfiction works, all exceedingly rare in the U.S., including Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth (2001) and Birth/Mother (2006)–nature and ancestry, past and present intertwined in both, each film connected inextricably to the other.

(Some practical details: Birth/Mother screens at the Walker on Thursday at 5:30, just before Kawase introduces The Mourning Forest, while Sky, Wind, Fire, Water, Earth screens the following afternoon in room 155 of Nicholson Hall, introduced by the director and co-presented by the U of M's Institute for Advanced Study Film Collaborative and its Consortium for the Study of the Asias. Both of these screenings are free–and not to be missed.)

The more experimental of the two (in a close contest), Sky, Wind finds Kawase combining discrete audio and video tracks in complex and sometimes disorienting ways. Clips of the director's teary phone talk with the biological father she had never known–"How did you get my number?" he asks, among other, more generous things–are played over benign images of people watching TV, as if to measure the oceanic distance between raw familial drama and an evening's entertainment. (Kawase has made it clear in interviews–as if it wasn't obvious in her films–that she's no fan of the Hollywood style.) Elsewhere, shots of nature–slow pans up the stems of dead or dying plants, for example–appear immediately poignant in the context of the filmmaker's own separation from her roots. (Kawase's great aunt Uno–star of Birth/Mother–raised the girl from birth at her niece's request.)

If the soundtrack of Sky, Wind bears the burden of conveying the film's story (i.e., Kawase attempts to come to terms with her father), the visuals serve as the director's reflection on the details–as the present rather than the past. This autobiographical doc also juggles elements of fiction–as when a clapperboard appears in a long scene of Kawase talking to an artist about getting a tattoo to match her dad's. What's amazing about the presence of that clapperboard isn't so much that it breaks the spell of nonfiction, but that it gets us thinking about the fundamental artifice of most any documentary, a personal one not least. Clapperboard or no, isn't "reality" already being directed in a film whose maker chooses to visit a tattoo artist and roll the camera? Here, Kawase effectively collapses the distinction between her life and her art–much as a tattoo does, you might say. To etch one's story in celluloid or on the body itself is to leave a permanent record–or, in some cases, a scar.

Birth/Mother–naturally–is about pain. Its first words are Kawase's, spoken from offscreen to her great aunt Uno–"Why did you adopt me?"–over the close-up image of something indistinctly bloodier than a Peckinpah frame, perhaps a placental sac. Filming while her elder was in the final stages of dementia, Kawase dares to begin the doc with her confrontational approach to the 90-year-old Uno, who's reduced by the conversation to tearful quivering. It's a fascinatingly bold, even abrasive film, never more so than in extreme close-ups of Uno's bruised, sagging flesh in a bathtub–shocking images, these, beautiful only through the viewer's strenuous effort (and not necessarily then).

Nearly every image in the first half carries with it the smell of death, reminding us that it's not a film about a relationship, but about the end of a relationship–the end of a life. At one point Kawase sings "Happy Birthday" (in English) to her great aunt and giggles as the old woman struggles to blow out candles with her thin breath. As much as the 1970s' American family docs of Western legend, Birth/Mother is unsparingly direct–and the gutsiest film of Kawase's that I've seen. The film's eventual focus on Kawase's pregnancy–culminating in the emergence of baby boy Mitsuki–relives it only somewhat of its ingeniously harsh vibe. Kawase fictionalized this material for the relatively gentle Mourning Forest, in which a young nurse befriends an old man with dementia, following him on a quest to find his wife's gravesite. But Birth/Mother plays as a work of the toughest love–a cathartic purge, seemingly at the expense of a dying woman's final memories. (Message: Past and present may indeed be closely connected–but the world belongs to the living.)

Kawase's films–her narrative films in particular–have been widely compared to those of Ozu and Naruse for taking intimate approaches to interpersonal relations. Not surprisingly, the work has proven too intimate for some. Writing from Cannes, Esquire's Mike D'Angelo–not a critic generally known for his great sensitivity–issued sarcastic advice to Mourning's bereaved heroine: "Talk to a shrink, lady." Expressing himself more tactfully, the Buenos Aires-based IMDB writer who notes Kawase's "exhibitionism" does have a point. Both Birth/Mother and the narrative feature Shara–labors of love in the literal sense–climax with Kawase's delivery of Mitsuki, while Sky, Wind contains glimpses of the then 27-year-old filmmaker receiving her first Cannes prize. "After Kurosawa and Oshima, I think Kawase will be the next internationally known name among this generation of [Japanese filmmakers]," said… Kawase!

The director, a noted lover of basketball, is hardly her winning team's only cheerleader, as evidenced in a post-Grand Prix message to GreenCine Daily from a fan named Beruk: "I'm so happy for Naomi Kawase! Please marry me Naomi!" Note to Beruk: Sorry, she's taken. Might you find what you're looking for in the wind, the light?

Film Critic and Walker Blogger Rob Nelson, clearly a man of many hats, is currently teaching a documentary film studies class at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He asked his students to weigh in on Nina Davenport’s documentary Operation Filmmaker, which will be playing at the Walker this Thursday (It’s a free screening!) as part of the Women With Vision Film Festival. Head over to the MinnPost page to read what they had to say.

In her recent rave review of Paranoid Park, the New York Times’ Manohla Dargis invokes Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. Dargis’ connection is no accident, as Van Sant himself credits Tarr’s work in helping shape his own vision in making his last four films: Gerry, Elephant, Last Days, and Paranoid Park(screening this Wednesday at the Walker). Last November the Walker was lucky enough to host a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective with auteur Tarr, whose mesmerizing, languid films are rarely shown in the U.S. Tarr was certainly a bit more tight-lipped about his thought process as a filmmaker than Van Sant, but analyzing the connections between the two is interesting nonetheless. I love how both Tarr and Van Sant’s work have so many similarities in terms of their sublime cinematography of long takes, shot with a slow-moving camera–and yet each is so rooted in their particular location: Tarr with his vast Hungarian wastelands, Van Sant with his Pacific Northwest ethos.

For a MOMA retrospective on Tarr, Van Sant wrote an essay about Tarr’s films, which I’ve reproduced below. When so many current filmmakers seem to eschew the past, I admire Van Sant for having the capacity to learn from a true master of cinema–and can’t wait to see Tarr’s influence manifest itself in Van Sant’s new work.

The Camera is a Machine

I have been influenced by Béla Tarr's films and after reviewing the last three works Damnation, Satantango, and Werckmeister Harmonies, I find myself attempting to rethink film grammar and the effect industry has had on it. This is the way I see it. Cinema started as simple single-shot full-length proscenium compositions resembling theater, the only thing that it could find to reference to commercialize itself. By the next twenty years there was a new vocabulary. The close up, montage, and parallel storytelling fragmented the continuity of the previous proscenium-encased static-frame full-figure images. Separate fragments were now placed together to form meaning, the director could play with time and cinematic space. It was exciting. Was this an absolute inevitable direction or just one road cinema chose to take?

I believe these cinematic innovations complimented industry and created an Industrial Vocabulary. The director could tell you how to think about scenes by the way he played with separate pieces. He could control his characters, he could control time and story, and he could control you. Left behind were the proscenium and the static take, which were old-fashioned.

Things were modern, things were easier, like doing your laundry, there was a washing machine now that would do it for you. The modern cinema was an invention that could think for you, you didn't have to do in anymore, like in the theater.

The Cinema of Industry has progressed into mega-industry and mega-cinema but remaining ideally the same? The cinematic vocabulary of a 2001 television show like Ally McBeal is virtually the same as Birth of a Nation's. It is no surprise that Citizen Kane has been considered the greatest film of all time, a film about selling oneself down the river along with the copper, coal and timber while nostalgically longing for a lost Victorian era, and film vocabulary's original beginnings, a Rosebud, that has been left behind in another century.

Béla's stuff seems to be a successful and authentic departure, a wholly other cinema beginning over again. A cinema that needed to come from outside our Western Culture, a lost Rosebud, one of the many directions cinema might have before we sold ourselves down the river.

Béla's creations use static full figure landscapes, as if referencing the 1800's steam engine pulling into a station that would force audience members standing in the gallery to run for the exit so they wouldn't get hit by the train. Somehow Béla has gotten himself back there psychically and learned things all over again as if modern cinema had never happened. An angry crowd marches down a street to burn down the hospital in Werckmeister Harmonies, a shot that lasts about five minutes. When asked after a screening why the shot of the crowd lasted for so long, Béla answered, "because it was a long way." The question was an honest one, why would the audience weaned on post modern industrial cinema sit and watch an angry mob for so long when they have been used to a shot that lasts only a couple of seconds, even a shot ten or fifteen seconds would be too long. But the answer, although funny, is also an honest one, it was a long enough way that to show it for five minutes it affects the way we think about the event, the mob, the march, the hospital. Not shorthanded, not as clipped as in Industrial Vocabulary, but played out lyrically and poetically, letting us in on the thoughts rather than just saying one thing like, the mob walked, rather; the mob walked, and grimaced and raised their torches, and walked in synchronized and unsynchronized steps, advanced, fell back, and when they arrived it had been a long way.

Hitchcock said in response to a question by François Truffaut that major stylistic film changes could happen through character, perhaps, but here is a very major change through ideas.

Béla's works are organic and contemplative in their intentions rather than shortened and contemporary. They find themselves contemplating life in a way that is almost impossible watching an ordinary modern film. They get so much closer to the real rhythms of life that it is like seeing the birth of a new cinema. He is one of the few genuinely visionary filmmakers.
--Gus Van Sant, MoMA Bela Tarr Retrospective Catalogue, 2001.

We’ve been following the career of Gus Van Sant for some time now. He was here in 2003 when for a Regis Dialogue and Retrospective. We premiered his film Gerry at that time, and that film marked the beginning of a departure from the style of filmmaking of his previous work. Longer takes and improvisation became a part of his filmmaking. Gerry might be my personal favorite, but Elephant really blew me away as well. I’ve been looking forward to Paranoid Park since hearing about its premiere at Cannes last year. It’s taken a while for it to make it’s way to the theaters, and it should be a spectacle on the screen here at the Walker. With Cinematography by long-time Wong Kar Wai collaborator Christopher Doyle and Kathy Li, and a newly completed sound sytem upgrade (more on this soon) in our Cinema, this should prove to be a great show.

We will be presenting a FREE screening of Paranoid Park On Wednesday, March 19.

Take a look at the trailer to get a sense of the film. (and a taste of the super 8 skateboarding footage.)

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.

The question that has been echoed for the past few years at Cannes may very well have a refrain here in the Twin Cities, albeit a quieter refrain. A recent article in the New York Times Magazine (”New Wave on the Black Sea“, A.O. Scott) brings to light two films that made brief appearances in the past, but also three films coming up at the Walker starting next week. The New Romanian Cinema section of the Expanding the Frame program will include Cristian Mungiu’s critically acclaimed 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days (2007) and two films from Cristian Nemescu, Marilena From P7 (2006) and California Dreamin’ (2007).

First, let’s do a little local Romanian recap. The film that started this whole critic-coined and director-refuted “New Wave” was Cristi Puiu’s The Death of Mr. Lazarescu. Mr Lazarescu premiered at Cannes in 2005 and landed in the Twin Cities June 2006 at the Parkway Theater when the theater was in a state that was more dismal than the plot of the film (a two-and-a-half hour film about, well, the death of Mr. Lazarescu .) Locally it was well received but sadly under-attended. A mere ten months later, another high profile Romanian film made an appearance at the 2007 Minneapolis St Paul International Film Festival: Corneliu Porumboiu’s hilarious 12:08 East of Bucharest. (Corneliu Porumboiu’s 2005 short entitled Liviu’s Dream played at the 2006 MSPIFF.)

The big story of the three films coming up at the Walker is Mungiu’s 4 Months, 2 Weeks, 2 Days (Wednesday, January 30, 7:30pm) which won the coveted Palme d’Or at Cannes and basically showed up on everybody who’s anybody’s list for 2007. The more quiet story, yet perhaps the more important story, is that of director Cristian Nemescu who died at the young age of 27 in 2006. Nemescu was certainly heralded as a rising star, but seems destine to become the forgotten luminary. The Walker will provide the rare opportunity to see two of his films: Marilena From P7 (Thursday, February 7, 7:30) and California Dreamin’ (Friday, February 8, 7:30).

So if I didn’t see you at Cristi or Corneliu’s screenings, maybe I will see you at Cristian or Cristian’s screenings next week. (There will be a test on Romanian director’s names before each screening.) As for Utah, judging from the reports (one and two), I’m starting to wonder if Rob made the wrong decision.

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).