ND/NF: Balancing Between Silence and Singing: Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow

Indigenous Peruvian Fausta (Magaly Solier), protagonist of director Claudia Llosa’s second feature The Milk of Sorrow, suffers her entire childhood and early adulthood from a condition referred to in her community as “la teta asustada,” translated in the film as “the milk of sorrow.” This affliction is believed to be transmitted to an infant who suckles from the breast of a raped and violated mother — as happened to Fausta’s mother and many of her neighbors in the village where Fausta was born during one of Peru’s periods of violent political upheaval.

The condition might not be listed in medical textbooks, but as far as popular notions go, Fausta would be a textbook case: burdened under a terror and sadness so heavy she rarely smiles, refusing to walk anywhere on the streets unaccompanied, and suffering from violent fainting spells and nosebleeds when she becomes overwrought. But despite a lifetime of certainty of the worst, Fausta hasn’t been entirely crushed. In the core of her being smolders an incredible power and beauty. When she is with her elderly mother there is joy and love. The film opens with Fausta listening to her grandmother sing. The sound of her song to my ears jangles at first with unfamiliarity, but compels me to listen and open myself to its authority. Fausta’s mother’s melody follows an order of the singer’s own devising — reminding me a little of the pansori performance opening Ch’unhyang (2000), an unfamiliar style requiring patience and attention to win me over.

Her mother’s lyrics, revealed through the subtitles, are grimmer than grim, evoking a darker time in Peru, full of anguish, rape at the hands of terrorists, the murder of husbands, a world many years before the film takes place. While I experience this strange disconnect between the eerie beauty of the song and the violence of the message, my heart surprises me by locating hope here between Fausta and her mother: the singer and listener have survived. But when Fausta’s mother dies, part of me fears that the private Fausta will herself die.

Another secret weighs at the core of Fausta’s physical body. Taking to heart the advice of one of Fausta’s mother’s neighbors for how to avoid rape during the years of terror, Fausta has inserted a potato deep into her vagina (Why a potato? Well, among other cultural significance to the potato in the region, Peru is said to be the birthplace of the potato).  Her mother’s neighbor had said that by making her body loathsome, she preserved her dignity. Indeed, the woman later removed the potato and bore her husband children. But the extremity of Fausta’s self-protection is out of step with the contemporary Peru she inhabits. When Fausta’s uncle brings her into the emergency room after the violent fainting spell that strikes her moments after the death of her mother, he tells the doctor of Fausta’s condition, victim of “la teta asustada.” The doctor isn’t interested in his abstract, poetic description of the “milk of sorrow”: he asks the uncle if he knows about the potato in Fausta’s vagina. An operation will be necessary to remove it before it causes her further injury: the potato has begun to sprout.

Fausta refuses to heed the contemporary world: she will not remove the potato, and turns her energy almost entirely to the question of how to transport her mother’s mummified body to the village where she was born for burial. And within the self-martyrdom of her refusal to believe her country can move beyond the terror of her early childhood, the seed of her mother’s secret singing begins, like the potato itself, to flower up inside her. And as the story develops, the film balances Fausta silence with the eruptions of her own singing, the purest concentration of her passion and feeling.

–Matthew Griffin

Buy Tickets:
Wed Apr 1: 6:15 (MoMA)
Fri Apr 3: 9 (FSLC)

ND/NF: The difficult but steady lives of Chinese coal miners in “The Shaft”

In a country whose rapidly growing economy (well, at least until recently) has fostered a surge in its need for and use of fossil fuels, someone has to do the digging. Digging for fuel, specifically in cavernous coal mines, often for very little pay  and in unsafe conditions, is an increasingly common profession in rural China.

One such family who’s lives are shaped by China’s late great entry as one of the world’s industrial powers is expertly documented in Zhang Chi’s The Shaft, which examines the compromises a young woman, daughter to a retiring coal miner and sister to a young entrant in the field, has to make in the face of her family’s inability to break free from the shackles of mining work and the loss of her mother.

Although not as unrelentingly bleak as the recent festival circuit favorites of Li Yang (Blind Shaft, Blind Mountain), like his work Chi’s debut theatrical feature has an indelible sense of place and offers an valuable glimpse into life in the Chinese countryside within a country in the throes of modernization. With a delicate eye that favors tableau like settings and symmetrical compositions (which probably also informs the schematic, three part story structure), Chi’s film has a palpable verisimilitude which gives the audience a strong sense of small town life in China’s Western Provinces. Whereas Yang gets at the difficulties of life in rural China through the rhythms of arty, slow burn thriller/tragedies in communities ruled by stagnant, misogynist social codes, Chi’s more interested in the positive aspects of community and family, especially amidst difficult circumstances.

While Yang’s delves deeply into notions of filial responsibility and allegorically, he also winds up suggesting, not unlike a product of big budget Chinese cinema like Zhang Yimou’s Hero, that subservience of one’s desires to that of the state (or its preferred means of ideological control, the patriarchal family). Regardless, someone has to care for those who do this sisyphean work. Someone has to love them in the face of their industrially sponsored  despair. It is in this spirit that Zhang Chi’s clinical look at the human costs of life at the bottom of the Chinese coal industry, aptly titled The Shaft, examines one family burdens with grace and dignity.

-Brandon Harris

Buy tickets: Wed Apr 1: 6:15 (FSLC)
Thu Apr 2: 9 (MoMA)

Ambiance and Ambivalence at New Direc– Aw, Screw It All, Let’s Get Hammered.

After drinking sake with Armond White, joshing with A.O. Scott and seeing a couple pretty-darn-good movies, I felt pretty content with my experience writing for New Directors/New Films, solid in the knowledge that I’d had a few adventures, laughs, et cetera. However, apparently this was not enough for the editorial staff who decided, with the precision of moving plastic soldiers in a game of Risk, to throw me in to the one situation I wasn’t prepared for:

An after-party.

The filmlinc blog's New Voices are out on the scene!

“Just make sure I don’t get too drunk too fast,” I told my friend. I thought for a second. “Or too slow.”

The Directors’ After-Party for the New Directors/New Films Festival was held Sunday night at Josephina, a classy New-American joint with organic-natural themes, the sort of place that seems smart and doesn’t do too bad either. People filed in from on early, starting at around 8:30 and a burst of unexpected rain seemed not to deter them.

As for the atmosphere, it was a difficult for me to discern who was who. Unlike Cannes or Sundance, ND/NF is a “working” festival; the people here aren’t on vacation. They see their films and then go home or go to work or back to their lives. Thus, there’s not a lot of opportunity for socializing before-hand in a small community like Park City, where the parties go on for nights.

Instead though, you manage to get an interesting cast of characters gathered from around the city’s film scene in one place. Given my singular ignorance, I was fortunate to run into a figure from my school, the well-connected-and-witty Jeremiah Newton, who volunteered to point out to me various figures, including film critics, directors, distributors and movie-house owners.

Still, the directors were hard to pick out, something that can be testified by the most common question asked to me that evening (“Do you have a film in the festival?”), to which I could only shake my head and grit my teeth, identifying myself as a lowly blogger. Still stranger were the times one managed to actually locate a director. Sterlin Harjo of Barking Water, a Native American road movie, was a nice guy, but after talking to him about the dearth of money for Native American cinema and Chris Eyre’s career, he was surrounded by his friends back from the buffet and I had to move.

Memo to Nick Feitel: the director above is So Yong Kim (Treeless Mountain)

A man I later found out was Vladimir Kott, of the Russian family comedy The Fly, said “yes” when I asked him if he was a director, but that was just about all the English he spoke.

“What film?” I asked enthusiastically.

“Zeflai,” he responded.

“What?”

“Zeflai. Zefli.”

We had a stand-still, for a moment, at the buffet.

“I have, uh, translator,” he said as he returned to getting food and turned away from me.

Updated: Another director I.D....Jack Pettibone Riccobono, co-director of KILLER

But all in all, I had a pretty good time, which I suppose is the point of these after-parties. Learning how to duck the Key-Lime-Tart Vodka-Drink offered and find your way to a glass of Merlot or a Whiskey Sour proved a good skill to learn and I even had some street cred with people coming up to me about my interview with Armond.

“Free booze, free food. Some good movie talk. I’ll take it in a flagging economy,” a fellow student told me.

“Come on,” I told my date. “My ears are turning red, along with the rest of my body.”

And then home.

-Nicholas Feitel, ND/NF New Voice

All photos by Susan Sermoneta.

ND/NF: Opening Night in pictures

A photo series by Susan Sermoneta:

From top: Amreeka director Cherien Dabis, the party in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art, Unmade Beds Director Alexis Dos Santos, two partygoers.

RELATED: Morgan H. Green’s review of Amreeka, and Brandon Harris’s interview with Alexis Dos Santos.

ND/NF: Birdwatchers glares from afar

Reaching at but never grasping the heels of the likes of Terrence Malick and Werner Herzog, Marco Bechis’s Birdwatchers portrays the on-going conflict of paradigmatic shift between the indigenous people of Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil and the “fazendeiros,” opulent opportunists who exploit the land and its naturals for monetary gain.  The wordless opening scene cuts from a glorious wide shot of the jungle to a motor boat cutting through a river, slowing to a stop so that the binocular and camera-clad tourists can gawk at the Indians standing around at the riverbed like a herd of deer.  As soon as the boat is out of sight, the Indians disperse into the woods to a clearing where they receive payment for a day’s work.  They get onto a truck bed where their jeans and T-shirts are, and are driven back to a reservation.   There, the supposed chief, a drunkard, and the tribe shaman decide that they must take their land back, and camp out on the property of the fazendeiros.  More Indians join “the movement” as time goes by, and soon the tensions escalate into “metaphorical and actual war.”

Bechi makes no qualms about his intentions being as didactic as they are lyrical.  His frames are constantly bisected, symbolizing the schism inherent to the film’s story, using as his go-to image that of harvested land versus the sprawling jungle.  The tribe’s youth are prone to the tonally accurate but logically ambigious act of suicide by hanging, putting an emphasis on the helplessness that plagues the marginalized group but also limiting the taking of one’s own life to a conceit (see: device).  The gravity of life lost is obscured by the preference for polemical narrative.  The most problematic and in some ways indicative misstep is in the decision to assign a shaky P.O.V. shot and boogeyman soundscape to the evil spirit the Indians believe are inhabiting the forest — Belchi’s images have a tendency towards the literal, and prove to be a disservice to its elemental story.

Films with the ambition of Birdwatchers rarely come this close to success however.  While Belchi may not be able to find the right balance between his aforementioned impulses towards sensory cinema and didactic grandstanding, there’s no shortage of talent on display here.  The film’s most powerful scene is a testament to sensibilities worthy of attention.  A young shaman-in-training, lit by headlights and guns pointed at him, lashes out against his oppressors, screeching a native war cry and promising their death by his hands.  It is at once cathartic in its moment of empowerment but devastating in its futility.  

One may wish that Malick or Herzog had helmed this instead, but there aren’t too many films that can’t be said about.

– Sam Song

Buy tickets:

Wed Apr 1: 9 (MoMA)
Thu Apr 2: 6:15 (FSLC)

Road-tested classics: see a ND/NF gem at Critic’s Choice

Sometimes you’re not ready for something new, different or mumblecore. Sometimes you want to see a movie that already has some critical gravitas behind it.

Critic’s Choice is for you. All this week we’ll be showing great films that premiered in past New Directors/New Films programs and went onto New York Critics Circle recognition, critical accolades, and even Academy Award nominations.

Monday @ 3PM: Big Night – Stanley Tucci’s mouthwatering directorial debut tracks the fortunes of two brothers running an uncompromising Italian restaurant. Try the Timpano at home if you dare!

Tuesday @ 3PM: Frozen River – The little indie that could, this film earned two Academy Award nominations (for best original screenplay and best actress, Melissa Leo) in a field crowded with films that with much bigger budgets. If you missed it, come see it here.

Wednesday @ 3PM: Metropolitan – Before there was Gossip Girl, there was Whit Stilman’s pitch-perfect depiction of the lives of well-to-do Upper East Side youngsters. A classic.

Thursday @ 3PM: In the Company of Men – Anyone checking out Reasons to be Pretty on Broadway? This must-see debut was what made Neil LaBute’s name.

Friday @ 3PM: Half Nelson – Back in 2006, this flick had huge word of mouth for its idiosyncratic depiction of a troubled drug-addicted high school teacher and his unlikely friendship with a student. Filmmakers Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck will be at the Film Society on Sunday to talk about their creative process as well.

ND/NF: Home is where the highway is in Ursula Meier’s quirky family drama

In an emblematic scene in Home, Ursula Meier’s first feature film, Marthe (the mother, played by Isabelle Huppert) wants to give snacks to two of her children, Julien and Marion, who stand across the newly-constructed highway from her after arriving home from school. With the encouragement of her children she decides to pitch the bag of food over the highway. The bag lands on the edge of the road and they erupt in cheer. Just as Julien tries to make a grab for it a car suddenly runs over the bag in a small burst of cheese and bread, much to everyone’s surprise. This scene highlights the warm love shared between the family, especially from the mother, as well as their unique, spontaneous approach to problem solving (that warrants a laugh and a cheer). At the same time, however, there is a rather dark quality to it in the way destruction can come suddenly — the obstacle of the highway is at first a comic problem, but it very quickly becomes a life-threatening one. This dichotomy of humor and dark drama comes to define Meier’s film, a subtle mix of emotional tones that is at once exhilarating and unnerving.

The story focuses on the drama that unfurls within a family when a highway is built right next to their house, blocking their normal route to the outside world (school, work) and making their daily routines a huge challenge. The family’s resolve to stay despite the highway and the noise, danger, and chaos it causes has them adapt in small and drastic ways: Marion, the bookish middle child, wears homemade hazmat suits to deal with the toxic emissions; they cement the walls and windows to reduce the noise. As the tensions within the family caused by the highway start to escalate the humor starts to fade and absurdism sets in, threatening to destroy the once happy-go-lucky family.

The central question Meier seems to be asking is: “What constitutes a home?” At first it is the house itself, the location (the middle of nowhere?) that allows the family freedom. As the house becomes destroyed, however, it becomes clear that home is something else (love? family? sanity?), though Meier never makes that something else explicit. Ultimately, Home forces us to ask: What are those things which keep us together, that make us feel secure, and (most importantly) what do we do when a highway is built right on top of them?

-Kazu Watanabe

Buy tickets to Home: Thu Apr 2: 9 (FSLC) and Sat Apr 4: 6:30 (MoMA)

ND/NF: The Cinematic Code of Director Laurel Nakadate’s Stay the Same Never Change

When contemporary artist Laurel Nakadate director of
Stay the Same Never Change (2009) introduced her debut feature to ND/NF audiences at MoMA Thursday evening, she felt it was important for the audience to recognize the film’s video art origins. “I wrote this script five and a half years ago, planning to be the girl in the video performing all the roles,” she told us. When Nakadate received funding and support from Kansas City-based contemporary art incubator Grand Arts, she aimed for a theatrical-length feature involving a cast of teenage girls and middle-aged bachelors, largely non-actors, to perform scenes from her script. I confess Nakadate’s “video art” warning helped me relax my pace /plot expectations from the outset, so I could give myself over to the private cinematic code of her excellent stewardship. What you are about to see is highly intentional conceived and constructed. And, to my taste at least, remarkably successful in achieving its internally defined goals.

In her video art and photography, Nakadate often uses herself as a central performer/provocateur, blurring the boundary between theatrical camp and “the ethnographic document” by engaging with non-actors collaborators in staged scenes of “playing pretend” that frequently prove genuinely discomforting to performers and audience. Often she uses single men she collects, those who approached her on the street, asking her out, often lonely middle aged bachelors. Her videos and photographs push into uncharted regions where what is socially permitted is uncertain. One example, she describes a project where she entered into the homes of bachelors with a birthday cake to ask them to help her make-believe it is her birthday, an activity she discovered to be almost wholly alien to their adult lives. (See interview with her in The Believer here.)

But her young teen non-actresses are the striking new feature of this film. These teens, selected through a lengthy casting process including investigation into social networking sites such as MySpace, performed in personal clothing in their homes, performing Nanadate’s fictional script. While a few moments of improvisation were necessary, “most it was closely scripted,” the director explained. “I think it is interesting and hard to have them pretend in their real homes.”

One unusual feature, lifted from broadcast journalism: Nakadate places black bars over the eyes of a number of the adult men in this film, obscuring their identities. This began when she wanted to remove a single individual from the film (and also there were others she had no releases for). “I tried just removing his face but keeping the body, and really liked it. […] The more I started barring the eyes of men, the more I started liking the scenes.”

Nakadate cages viewers in the teenagers’ unfathomable boredom, adrift within the boundless empty American spaces they haunt. For me, the specificity of her critique, the day-lit horror of the girls’ drifting lives the ambiguity/menace of the men observing them, kept my deeply engaged, deeply disturbed. The film may prove, for certain New Yorkers, something of a “flyover horrorflick”: far more terrifying than any slasher film, for its omission of scenes of hope, activity, cultural institutions, art, interpersonal exchange, careerism, commuting.

–Matthew Griffin

Buy Tickets

Sat Mar 28: 3:30 (FSLC)

On hipster-nihilsm, mumblecore and the proper way to drink sake: a conversation with Armond White

Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Armond White, lead film critic for the New York Press, head of the New York Film Critics’ Circle and presenter of the Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan at the Critic’s Choice screening at ND/NF.

Mr. White is the sort of film critic both popular and occasionally reviled in circles of filmgoers and enthusiasts. Where all film critics might zig right, he zags left. He is as well known for his passionate defense of the art of film criticism as he is for his bombastic reviews of crowd favorites (recently Coraline, Hunger, Duplicity) often declaring “shit” where others might say masterpiece. And vice-versa. Films that he has championed included Meet Dave, Little Man, and most recently, The Transporter 2.

He is also famous for his coining of the term “hipster-nihilist,” a group he faults for many of the ills of American cinema, not-withstanding 2008’s The Dark Knight, a film he panned as “sentinel of our cultural abyss.” As a long-haired, relatively-bearded young-man with no particular religious tendencies, I had more than a thought for my safety as I sat down to speak with Mr. White.

I started off asking him why he chose Metropolitan.

“The same reason I write the way I write,” he told me. “I like individual voices, voices that haven’t been heard and that are authentic. You don’t see a lot of films from the perspective of privileged-WASP-20s debutantes and Whit portrays them sympathetically. It’s interesting to hear a different voice and I think that’s what I provide too.”

I asked him then about the New Directors/New Films festival (“Well, I’m presenting in it,” he told me.) and then is there were any New Directors he admired.

“I don’t know about ‘new directors.’ I like Jared Hess of Napoleon Dynamite better than Neil LaBute. Jared obviously speaks more from a moralistic Mormon experience, which is interesting and new, than LaBute,who presents himself as a Mormon, but who just likes to see people being awful to each other. I also like Charles Stone III of Drumline and Mr. 3000, some of the best American films in years.”

I told him that I too was a Neil LaBute hater, but that I hadn’t seen Drumline. But when I asked him about Kelly Reichardt or Lance Hammer or Ryan Fleck, he shut them down one by one, as “fakery”, admitting only of Ms. Reichardt that “at least she’s trying to have an aesthetic and hone it.”

Finally, I decided to ask him about a subject which I thought might get a kick out of him: the hipster-nihilist 20 and 30-somethings of the “mumblecore” movement.

“Those guys need to go watch some movies and grow up. There are only so many ideas for a movie. Instead of watching Eric Rohmer and finding some sort of aesthetic, they decide to make movies that are aesthetically vacant and boring. If they were at Columbia, where I teach, they might have learned something.”

“Am I a hipster-nihilist?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. Are you?” he replied.

I admitted I was at NYU Film School and that I also wrote criticism (in fact, that I had met him a couple times before). I asked him is he had any advice to young filmmakers or young critics like myself.

“Don’t make a movie until you’re 40,” he said.  “Then, you’ll have something to make a movie about. Of course, rules are meant to be broken. Also, no offense, but blogs aren’t film criticism. They’re a bunch of young people going on about things they’re not ready to talk about. I’ve been writing about movies since junior high. Did that make me a film critic then? No. You can’t put these kids on blogs in the same category as Pauline Kael or Andrew Sarris. You have to train at it, work at it. Till then, nope.”

And while a part of me felt a little downtrodden, being called “not a film critic”, another part of me saw the value in what he was saying. Because really, that’s what’s so fascinating about Armond White, what keeps my film-school-friends and I coming back week-after-week: even when you don’t like what he’s saying or disagree, well, he’s always got a point.

Our bottle of sake was almost out as I saw Mr. White with a full glass.

“Drink up,” I told him.

“You have to sip sake,” he told me, right after I’d downed a shot.

“Ah, man. Sorry,” I replied, embarrassed.

He shook his head, laughed and raised his glass. “Actually, forget that. Drink sake how you enjoy it,” he said and took his shot.

Cheers.

-Nicholas Feitel, ND/NF New Voice

ND/NF: An interview with Unmade Beds director Alexis Dos Santos

Marking his return to New Directors/New Films this year is Alexis Dos Santos, whose debut feature Glue was among the 2007 crop of films. He’s back this year with Unmade Beds. Just picked up for domestic distribution by IFC Films, it centers on a young Spanish man searching for a father he’s never know and a French woman struggling with loneliness and the remember of love’s past. Like Glue, it takes a whimsical, aesthetically adventurous look at the rootlessness of contemporary young people. Set in the hipster precincts of London, the duel protagonists don’t meet until the film’s final reel, but share a sprawling flat with an assortment of other young, bohemian squatters.

“I’m attracted to stories about young people and youth culture in general” said Dos Santos when I chatted with him recently. “I’m not sure why. The films I’m interested in and writing now take place in that kind of world. I feel like I’m still there. I’m depicting things I can relate to, things that I know. I want to continue to make films that feel personal and this is the territory where I feel comfortable making those types of films.” Featuring terrific performances from its leads, the film, despite its wanderlust and visual poetry, is rooted in dueling tales of the search for interconnection with and solace from others; in Spainard Axel’s case, it’s a father who left him at a young age, in Frenchwoman Vera’s, its sustainable intimacy with a lover. About his sustained interest in tales of the young and unhinged, Dos Santos said “It’s something I might grow out of a few years time, but I’m still there. I don’t feel like, oh I’m a mature person, cause I’m not.”

Unmade Beds had its World Premiere at Sundance last January before making its International Premiere at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film is already receiving broad acclaim. Manohla Dargis, writing about the film in The New York Times during Sundance, called it “an intimate, tender feature” that “has a level of formal ambition — the narrative is as elliptical as the lives it concerns, and even seemingly throwaway moments catch your eye.”

“What I’m trying to do in the film is to have two stories told in parallel using subjective film techniques as opposed to having the storyteller/director be omnipotent” said Dos Santos when asked what he attempting to achieve using the film’s duel protagonist structure. “What I’m trying to do is to get into this characters head. Every time you go into one of the stories you go straight into their point of view.”

-Brandon Harris

Buy Tickets:
Sat Mar 28: 6 (FSLC)
Mon Mar 30: 9 (MoMA)