The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens is presenting its fourteenth edition of the “First Look” festival this week, running from March 12 to 16. “First Look” is a collection of innovative and remarkable new features from around the world, many making their U.S. or North American premieres. The festival also includes a number of talks and presentations of works in progress. And some films are prefaced by curated shorts. (I’ll be reviewing those tomorrow.) Go here for ticket info and more information. And go here to watch Adam Schartoff’s interview with festival programmer Eric Hynes. (Or go here to listen to it as a podcast.) Here are a few of my favorite features in the festival.
The festival’s opening night film is the new adaptation of Francois Sagan’s novel “Bonjour Tristesse” which was previously filmed by Otto Preminger in 1958. A Canadian production filmed in English, it’s rapturously beautiful and very well directed by first-timer Durga Chew-Bose who has a splendid sense of composition and tone.
Chloe Sevigny plays Anne, the part Deborah Kerr played in the 1958 production and Lily McInerny plays the eighteen-year-old Cécile that Jean Seberg played in the 1958 film. Cécile is spending the summer on the French Riviera with her widowed father (a wonderful Claes Bang) and his girlfriend Elsa (Nailia Harzoune). The three of them live a carefree life in this idyllic setting, one that is interrupted when family friend Anne, a famous fashion designer arrives. Anne is a bit of a scold and begins to make demands on Cécile, who has been neglecting preparations for the next school year. She is also critical of her relationship with a young lover and making a move to replace Elsa. Cécile’s plot for revenge forces her and her father to consider the cost of their cavalier lifestyles. New York premiere with director Durga Chew-Bose and star Lily McInerny in person.
“Diciannove” is Italian for nineteen, which is the age of the film’s main character, Leonardo, played by Manfredi Marini, who is very good in this, his first movie role. Leonardo (or as his friends call him, “Lele”) is a callow, somewhat petulant youth who grew up in Palermo, Sicily and has gone to London to attend business school. He lives with his sister and her friend who take him to sexy all-night parties but soon they get fed up with his lack of motivation and slovenly behavior. Lele has lost interest in studying business and abruptly transfers to a school in Sienna to study literature. He quickly decides that his professors know nothing; he prefers, for example, early 19th-century interpretations of Dante then those by contemporary scholars.
Though handsome and sought out by a pretty female student, he rejects social life, living like a stoic, reading all day, cooking on a hot plate in his room instead of using the communal kitchen. Leonardo tells his sister and cousin that he dislikes the way the Italian language has been corrupted over the centuries, that it has been emptied of morality. And he refers to something catastrophic he did earlier in his life; he is trying to assuage his guilt.
After a brief return home, he goes to Torino to study on his own. When sent to an elderly artist friend of his grandmother he is told that he suffers from what Freud called “the death instinct” and warned that his fanaticism could lead him to the same end as a young ISIS terrorist. Lele seems ambiguously happy or content about his interaction with him.
Director Giovanni Tortorici (and produced by his “Challengers” mentor Luca Guadagnino) makes use of a huge assortment of unconventional editing techniques (slow motion, text on screen, lettrisme, quick cutting, inserts) and a variety of music styles (classical, medieval, trap and hip hop) to illustrate the brooding, tortured state of mind Lele is suffering from. But aside from an overbearing mother, it’s never made clear why he is so indecisive or what the “catastrophic” event was. There are scenes indicating he is torn by his sexual orientation: his gets an erection while on a train when an older man masturbates to him; he briefly considers being a male prostitute; he is obsessed with a boy he spots kissing a girl. I couldn’t help but think of Marcello, in “The Conformist,” who was raped by a male and murdered him, one of the reasons–Bertolucci seemed to imply–that Marcello becomes a fascist during World War II. But it could have been a peccadillo he has magnified in his mind;it could simply be a case of teenage “acting out.” The title of this fascinating coming-of-age film made me think of Sharon Van Etten’s song “Seventeen” and the accompanying video and the freeze frame at the end harkens back to the last frame of “The 400 Blows.” And the beautiful Italian architecture seen throughout the film is a welcome bonus. U.S. premiere. Closing night feature. Director Giovanni Tortorici will appear in person, followed by a reception.
President Trump’s recent decision to block almost a half-billion dollars in federal grants to Columbia University because of pro-Palestinian protests there over the past year (even though university administrators cracked down harshly on the activists) is the latest evidence that Americans are being encouraged to think that criticizing the genocidal policies of the Israeli government is the same as anti-semitism. It is not, and great documentaries like “Israel Palestine on Swedish TV 1958-1989,” can help those misinformed by corporate media learn the truth about the Palestinian issue. This three hour-plus film was directed by Göran Hugo Olsson, the same man who made the great 2011 “The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975,” and here he again scours the archives of Swedish TV, this time collecting reporting about the long campaign (it actually began in 1914 with the UK’s Balfour Declaration) to relocate and terrorize Palestinians. Beginning from the tenth anniversary of Israel’s founding and ending with the First Intifada, Olsson presents a wealth of historical footage demonstrating how a settler colonialist country, aided by rich Western allies, sowed the seeds of despair and revolt. Highly recommended. North American premiere. Director Göran Hugo Olsson will appear in person.
After critic-turned-filmmaker Charlie Shackleton couldn’t get the rights to the true crime book he wanted to turn into a documentary, he created “Zodiac Killer Project,” a meta-documentary about the story the doc would have told, all the while hilariously reviewing the tropes and conventions of the popular true crime doc genre. The narration is a bit snarky at points but otherwise this is very insightful and even spooky. New York premiere.
The fifth shot of “La Jetée,” Chris Marker’s great photomontage short, shows a man and woman at Orly airport (above) with their young son, standing by a gate as they watch visitors arrive. And “The Fifth Shot of La Jetée” is the name of Dominique Cabrera’s mysterious and often hypnotically obsessive new doc about a possible family connection to the science-fiction masterpiece and the power of images.
Cabrera’s family was one of thousands of French people born in Algeria (called “pieds-noirs”) who moved to Paris when Algeria gained independence from French colonial rule in 1962, the same year “La Jetée” was made. Decades later, Dominique’s cousin is convinced that the child in the fifth frame of the Marker film is him, standing alongside his parents. The meandering testimony of family members trying to verify the cousin’s claim is less interesting than what the work reveals about the making of the film and what it says about colonialism, collective memory and Marker’s work as a whole. Much of the film takes place in a mysterious room filled with multiple editing consoles and screens as if the space was a correlative of a dystopian image repertoire headquarters Chris Marker might have constructed himself. North American premiere.
Iva Radivojevic’s “When the Phone Rang,” inspired by her own memories of the Bosnian War, artfully depicts the trauma many young Serbs experienced in the days leading up to the tragic conflict. Lana, an eleven-year-old girl, picks up the phone one morning in 1992 to learn that a grandparent has died. The narrative reprises the call eleven times as a device to explore the fragmentation of memory after traumatic events. Alternating between narration and the voices of the actors, Lana navigates a variety of stressful challenges and quotidian events–returning her father’s overdue porn videotapes, passing along a message from a mob boss, hanging out with a skinhead male friend–all the while with the unavoidable need to leave Yugoslavia as life becomes unbearable. U.S. premiere. Director Iva Radivojevic will appear in person.
“Sanctuary Station,” is a beautiful, inspiring new documentary about people who have chosen to live off the grid in the redwood forests in Northern California and activists who are fighting to save the forest. One such person is the late poet Mary Norbert Körte, who reads from her work throughout the film, which is shot in 16mm black-and-white. A variety of women speak in voice-overs as director Brigid McCaffrey provides a spiritually resonant portrait of the value of simple living and the urgent need to preserve these incredible natural resources. North American premiere. Director Brigid McCaffrey will appear in person.
In “Chronicles of the Absurd,” director Miguel Coyula and his actress/wife Lynn Cruz document the rigid censorship and control Cuban artists face today. The Cuban government requires artists to seek authorization from state-sponsored councils. Independent artists face limited employment and rights. After Coyula and Cruz make a low-budget sci-fi film (“Corazón Azul”) in 2011, they find that screenings in Cuba are blocked by the police, they are brought in for questioning about the content and funding of the film and Lynn loses agency representation for being in a film critical of the government. Consisting mostly of clandestine audio recordings, the film deploys photos, avatars and animations to explore the paranoid reality of being an “artivist”: an activist Cuban artist. U.S premiere. Filmmakers Miguel Coyula and Lynn Cruz will appear in person.
“A Want in Her” is Irish filmmaker Myrid Carten’s heart-breaking portrait of her and her uncle’s struggle to manage the alcoholism and mental health issues of her mother. Often gone missing, living on the street or in hostels, the mother is combative and ungrateful when living with the uncle. Her own husband is dying of alcoholism and drug abuse. Myrid uses home movies (including dramatizations she filmed as a child of the domestic unrest in her family), experiments staged with her mother in the present and phone calls with police and social services (and those in Northern Ireland seem remarkably empathetic) to illustrate the struggle she and others have with guilty feelings the mother’s behavior incites in them–are we responsible or is it all her responsibility? New York premiere.