2000 – 2001 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $30.00
2000
Not One Less
In a rural Chinese village, a 13-year-old student becomes an emergency substitute teacher. When one of her charges, a 10-year-old boy, leaves to find work in a vast, nameless city, she abandons her post and sets out to find him. Zhang Yimou shot this film in a style that might be called austere fabulism — using documentary techniques, casting non-actors, presenting raw concrete walls and dirt roads in all their authentic ugliness, yet shaping the story like a fable from the silent-film era. It becomes a slow-motion chase movie, and the persistence of the young teacher gives the film a tone of hilarious monomania. Intentionally or not, Zhang reveals the meanness and impersonality of contemporary Chinese society.
2000
Life Is to Whistle
Like so many characters in Latin American literature, the three major characters in Fernando Pérez's lush, hallucinatory film walk around with an awareness of the supernatural that simultaneously inspires and oppresses them. As these passionate, troubled residents of Havana — all three of them orphans — go about their lives, we have an acute sense of their being haunted and held back by religious and ancestral specters. The director's masterstroke is his portrayal of their internal conflicts as a metaphor for the political and economic anxieties gripping Cuba in the twilight of the Castro era. The movie is so deeply in sync with its characters' passions that it sustains a mood of heady sensuality.
2001
East-West
After World War II the Soviet government undertook a propaganda campaign to entice Russian nationals living in the West to return home. Aleksei Golovine (Oleg Menchikov) and his French wife Marie (Sandrine Bonnaire) are luckier than most of their fellow returnees, who are killed or imprisoned on arrival. The film chronicles Aleksei's ambivalence about their new life in a drab communal apartment and Marie's desperate attempts to escape it. Using the resources of old-fashioned emotionally emphatic filmmaking, East-West is a grand costume pageant and a portrait of a marriage under extreme pressure — a showcase for Bonnaire and Catherine Deneuve, playing an actress who becomes aware of Marie's plight during a Soviet tour.
2001
Topsy-Turvy
Mike Leigh's brilliant recreation of the most famous partnership in British theater — the collaboration of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in the glory era of imperial rule. Sullivan (Allan Corduner), a libertine with serious pretensions as a composer, and Gilbert (Jim Broadbent), formal, irascible, and asexual but a great theatrical pro, are so dissimilar in temperament that they can hardly bear each other's company. Leigh suggests that the combination of sentimental languor and incisiveness produced the art of The Mikado, whose preparation and first performance take up the second half of the movie. One of the greatest movies about the theater.
2001
Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl
During the Cultural Revolution, a tailor's teenage daughter is sent to the Tibetan plains to learn horse herding preparatory to joining the Iron Girls Cavalry. There she bonds with a nomad and is stranded when the cavalry is disbanded and only the politically well-connected are allowed to return home. Seduced by a handsome peddler and taken advantage of by soldiers, she finally joins with the nomad in a final, courageous act of violence in a film that maintains a poetic distance from its brutal physical facts. Directed by the Chinese actress Joan Chen; banned by the Chinese government.
2001
The Color of Paradise
This beautiful Iranian movie — about a widowed father reluctant to care for his blind 8-year-old son — is a heartbreaker done with such conviction that it avoids mawkishness. When the special school the boy has been attending won't keep him on, the father takes his son first to the family's woodland homestead, then leaves him in the care of a blind carpenter. The movie evokes nature with an ecstatic sensuousness, its heady soundtrack teeming with the sounds of birds, insects, wind, and rain. Directed by Majid Majidi.
2001
West Beirut
Tarek, Omar, and May are a teen triangle from Beirut families of different ethnic and religious groups — Phoenician, Muslim, and Catholic. What a world they inhabit: constantly snacking, acting out in school, full of energy, with an almost studied lack of seriousness — all in 1975. Then war comes along and divides Beirut into West and East. At first the trio maintains their irrepressible optimism, but they soon discover that a Quranic verse or a cross can get you either killed or rescued depending on the situation. The struggle to cope wears everyone down as the realities of rationing, lawlessness, and danger seep in.
2001
Kadosh
Directed by Amos Gitai, today's best-known Israeli filmmaker, Kadosh focuses on deeply rooted conflicts between personal and political concerns. Rivka is a Jewish woman whose inability to bear children threatens her marriage to an ultra-Orthodox man. Although her husband doesn't want to break up their household, his rabbi argues that childless marriages must be ended in order to outpace secular Israeli Jews politically. Rivka's experiences are echoed by those of her sister Malka, who has tried to please her family by marrying a devout but unfeeling man. Gitai handles his potentially melodramatic material with unfailing taste and compassion.
2001
All About My Mother
The joys of acting, the complexity of human relationships, and the slippery nature of sex and gender roles are among the concerns of Pedro Almodóvar's Academy Award-winning dramatic comedy about a woman trying to reorder her life after the untimely death of her teenage son. This may be Almodóvar's most finely crafted picture since Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988) established him as Spain's most important living director.
2001 – 2002 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $30.00
2001
Me You Them
The charming Me You Them, by Brazilian filmmaker Andrucha Waddington, features Regina Case as Dolores, a young woman from a backward province who is abandoned, pregnant, at the altar. Deprived of a husband, Dolores eventually finds herself supplied with no less than three — all living peacefully together under the same roof. Said to be based on a real case of polygamy, the film simply shows that for someone like Dolores, who is an earth mother without even trying, one thing leads to another. It weds the humor and magic of a folk tale with a very modern feel for the psychological dynamics between men and women and for the subtle politics of male rivalry in a macho culture.
2001
Yi Yi (A One and a Two)
In exchange for three hours of your time, Yi Yi will give you more life. Edward Yang, the Taiwanese filmmaker who wrote and directed this intimate epic of a middle-class Taipei family's everyday struggles, knows that for a movie to be full of life, it must above all concern itself with specific lives. Yi Yi begins with the chaotic bustle of wedding preparations and ends with the somber calm of a funeral. In the long interval between these events, the members of the Jian family collectively and individually traverse what feels like the full spectrum of human experience, from the mundane to the catastrophic. A memorable treat.
2001
The Dish
The quirky, colorful real-life story of a small band of Australian engineers who ended up with the huge responsibility of transmitting the live feed on that historic day in July 1969, when man first set foot on the moon. Sam Neill plays the imperturbable pipe-puffing engineer in charge of a radio telescope the size of a football field. There is a particularly touching moment when the entire town gathers around the TV to watch Neil Armstrong's first step, and they all realize that he and they have become part of history. The Dish has affection for every one of its characters, forgives them their trespasses, and is very funny.
2002
The Road Home
Zhang Ziyi, co-star of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, is delicately arresting in Zhang Yimou's beautifully textured, disarmingly simple movie. She plays Zhao Di, an 18-year-old girl who falls in love with, then marries her village's new teacher. The film starts years later, right after the teacher has died, and his son returns to the village for the funeral — taking a lovely, romantic trip to the past. Director Zhang Yimou, screenwriter Bao Shi, and cinematographer Hou Yong take a small tale and make it almost transcendental.
2002
The Widow of Saint-Pierre
This tale of crime, punishment, and passion in 19th-century French Canada has the bold, earnest emotion of a classic 1940s Hollywood melodrama. Emir Kusturica plays a fisherman convicted of a senseless murder, who is placed under the supervision of the local military commander (Daniel Auteuil) and his wife (Juliette Binoche) until a guillotine can be found. The film's moral seriousness, coupled with the complex triangle of jealousy, honor, and sympathy that develops between the condemned man and his protectors, makes this an unusually satisfying period drama. Even as it moves toward tragedy, it carries a heady, thrilling sense of artistic risk.
2002
The Taste of Others
In the provincial city of Rouen, a married factory owner falls in love with a local actress after seeing her in a production of Racine's Bérénice. The actress, a refined and lonely woman, hangs out with a closed bohemian circle and is appalled by her wealthy admirer, who tells blundering, unfunny jokes. From this collision of tastes, Agnès Jaoui creates a wonderfully funny scenario in which artistes and bourgeoisie collide and reassess what they want out of life. The film has subtle, tender, and acute things to say about romance, art, class, and — why not? — interior decorating.
2002
Solas
Spanish director Benito Zambrano has made an extraordinary and heartfelt film about a good-hearted woman identified only as Mother. Solas ("Alone") takes place over a few days in which Mother leaves her village for the city to care for her often-abusive husband, recovering from surgery. While in the city, she moves in with her daughter María — a 35-year-old single woman who drinks too much and is pregnant by her insensitive boyfriend. Mother also gets to know María's downstairs neighbor, a genial widower desperate to share his life with someone. That humanity — from the mother's quiet strength and the neighbor's indefatigable kindness — becomes the guiding light for this memorable chronicle of simple lives and moral complexities.
2002
Under the Sand
A fine new feature from French director François Ozon — his quietest creation to date, but also his most provocative. Charlotte Rampling plays Marie, whose husband disappears from a beach. Everyone but Marie believes him dead, and Ozon finds both method and madness in her noble refusal to meet the truth. What could have been glum or morbid is made almost thrilling by Ozon's ruthless cuts and punchy compositions. Rampling sways back and forth between the litheness of youth and the fallen hopes of middle age. The ending, suitably enough, is too mysterious for words.
Jun 1, 2002
In the Mood for Love
The latest film from Hong Kong writer-director Wong Kar Wai makes us pant for adultery. In the early 1960s, in a community of Shanghai refugees living in Hong Kong, Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow are next-door neighbors. The perfectly dressed and coiffed couple meet, talk, and realize that their frequently traveling spouses are off having an affair with each other. The movie is all about sensual anticipation. Nat King Cole croons on the soundtrack, and the camera caresses the rain on the streets and the texture of a stone wall in the semi-darkness. This breathtakingly gorgeous movie is dizzy with a nose-against-the-glass romantic spirit that has been missing from the cinema for years.
2002 – 2003 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $30.00
2002
Amélie
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's exquisite, whimsical fable follows meek, almost saintly Parisian Amélie Poulain (Audrey Tautou), who makes a quiet decision to transform as many sad lives as she can. And when she meets potential soulmate Nino Quincampoix (Mathieu Kassovitz), a genial loner, Amélie has to decide if her ability to change people's lives applies to herself. Wildly amusing, sometimes sardonic, and always touching, the movie's narrative inventiveness and extraordinary visual compositions put most filmmakers to shame.
2002
Iris
Powerful acting makes this drama a remarkable tour de force. Kate Winslet and Judi Dench play, respectively, writer Iris Murdoch in her twenties and later years. The story is an intimate, sobering window on Murdoch and her husband John Bayley's complicated life together — a relationship of intense privacy from each other, but also forced intimacy as Bayley tended to her physical needs during her struggle with Alzheimer's disease. As the novelist and philosopher, Dench enjoys some of her finest moments; as her husband, Jim Broadbent makes a magnificent counterbalance.
2002
Y Tu Mamá También
The latest movie from Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón is a stripped-down road movie — two teenage friends, one rich and one poor, borrow a car and set off to find the perfect beach, in the company of a Spanish woman who seems inexplicably happy to take either, or both, of them to bed. What ensues is a sad and sexy picaresque, as everyone's illusions are peeled off along with their clothes. Cuarón's style is so open and relaxed and his actors so attuned to one another that not until the final scene, with its litany of revelations, do we see that what felt life-affirming has almost been a meditation on the slide of time, and on the off-stage presence of death.
2003
Monsoon Wedding
Mira Nair's latest picture is a barely stable compound of the wounding, the confusing, and the appealing. The action takes place in Delhi, where a pair of middle-class parents work themselves into a froth over the nuptials of their daughter. Her marriage is arranged; for all the racket and buzz of the film's modernity, it finds time to suggest that from this archaic arrangement can spring an enduring love. The groom is flying in from Houston; another relative travels from Australia. The result is a comedy, but only just — India's stressful poise between orthodoxy and innovation leads to a devastating family fracture that is only half-healed by the celebrations at the end.
2003
Baran
In Majid Majidi's deep, touching movie, an Iranian gofer named Latif becomes angry when his foreman forces him to do hard physical work and gives his cushy catering job to an illegal Afghan worker named Rahmat. But the more Latif finds out about his replacement, the more he likes. As with Charlie Chaplin's silent-movie classics, Baran is eloquently visual, heartbreaking, and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. Humor and tragedy dance a wonderful tango throughout the movie — these moments really hit home.
2003
Lantana
In this enthralling Australian movie directed with great subtlety by Ray Lawrence, four married couples — most of them approaching midlife — are struggling with unmet needs and barely hidden anxieties. The characters are strikingly original, and the performances are great, particularly from Anthony LaPaglia, Barbara Hershey, Geoffrey Rush, Rachael Blake, and Kerry Armstrong. The movie doesn't settle for pat judgments — it examines the darker sides of the morally victimized and the more saintly sides of the victimizers. And it's often wickedly funny.
2003
Italian for Beginners
Lone Scherfig's warm and fuzzy romantic comedy is the first movie directed by a woman to follow the rigorous aesthetic principles of the Dogme 95 filmmakers, who insist on natural lighting, hand-held cameras, and other supposedly purifying cinematic techniques. It is also the first time the style has been applied to a light romantic comedy — the story of six lonely singles in their 30s who pair off and travel together to Venice. The result is a movie that looks like a John Cassavetes film but ends up emitting the benign feel-good vibrations of a movie like Enchanted April.
2003
Nine Queens
A splendid new film from Argentina about a couple of grifters who team up for a day and night of swindles in Buenos Aires. From the moment that Juan, a young hustler with the baby-faced cool of Antonio Banderas, gets rescued by Marcos, a 40-ish cultivated fellow who looks like a jazz-beatnik version of Mephistopheles, we believe in our guts that these are real, heartless, scrambling guys. The film is as tricky and satisfying as a David Mamet cinematic shell game, with an aura of authenticity that works on pure edge-of-the-moment dramatic terms.
2003
Late Marriage
Dover Kosashvili's potent feature is set among Georgian immigrants in Israel, where a 31-year-old student trails his parents to matchmaking dates while carrying on a romance with an older Moroccan divorcée. The sexual connection between the pair, while striking in its realism, is no more astonishing than the way that Kosashvili balances comedy and misery. As the movie forcefully reminds us, arranged marriage may be an antiquated tradition in the West, but it still flourishes largely unchallenged in many other parts of the world — and marital laws and customs are so fundamental to any society that they ultimately define what it means to be a man or a woman.
2003 – 2004 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $30.00
2003
Rabbit-Proof Fence
In 1931, three Aboriginal girls fled a state-run native settlement in Western Australia and walked more than twelve hundred miles to their home village. Director Phillip Noyce presents their journey in a straightforward way, giving patient attention to the desolate landscape and the almost wordless resolve of the girls. The movie only hints at the cruelties inflicted on the Aborigines, but the hints are enough. A heartbreaking, elemental film.
2003
Nowhere in Africa
A leisurely, warm-hearted chronicle of an upper-class Jewish family that flees Nazi Germany to start life over in Kenya. The story tells of Walter and Jettel Redlich, a successful lawyer and his beautiful, elegant wife whose lives are transformed once they relocate to Africa with their young daughter, Regina. Despite a shaky narrative focus and dramatic reticence, its journey is consistently absorbing. As its events pass before your eyes, the movie suggests an episodic diorama whose attractive, complicated characters are held discreetly at arm's length. Winner of the 2002 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
2003
Talk to Her
Like all great doomed affairs, Talk to Her is full of lovely, sweet suffering. And when it's over, the realization of how much the movie means to you really sinks in; you can't get it out of your heart. Pedro Almodóvar has created a tragic comedy about need, its liberating and shackling powers. Movies haven't been so rapturous about characters plummeting to an awful end at least since the last Almodóvar film, All About My Mother. But he doesn't mine the comic-strip soap opera mystique so extravagantly here — everything falls into place with an almost surreal delicacy.
2003
Read My Lips
A half-deaf but observant secretary (Emmanuelle Devos), who reads people's lips and attitudes and feels like a loser, and a mangy ex-con (Vincent Cassel), with a blank look in his eyes and an endless capacity for trouble, make a very odd couple. But writer-director Jacques Audiard, working close to his actors with a camera devoted to glances, reactions, and tiny gestures, gets us to believe that these two hard cases are destined for each other. They form an alliance and renew themselves by ripping off unsavory characters. The movie turns into a breathless and rather audacious study in the sexiness of a nonsexual relationship.
2004
Man on the Train
French director Patrice Leconte has settled on his most consoling subject: the comedy of good companionship. Johnny Hallyday (France's answer to Elvis) plays Milan, a low-level hit man who arrives at the bluish end of a day in a small French town and accepts the offer of a room from Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), a retired schoolteacher. We are granted the languorous pleasure of watching two people lock gently together. They even trade roles: Rochefort, the most playful melancholic in cinema, learns to fire a gun, while Hallyday takes up pipe and slippers. All of this is delectable.
2004
Mostly Martha
A quite adorable addition to the cooking melodrama-comedy subgenre. It's a German comedy about a workaholic chef who has to force herself out of her fixation and get a life. Martha (Martina Gedeck), a chef in an upscale Hamburg restaurant, is focused and good at her game. When her 8-year-old niece Lina arrives at her doorstep because her mother has been killed in a car accident, Martha doesn't know what to do. The film's humor emerges from the battle of wills between Martha and Lina, and from Martha's collision with the easy-going Italian sous-chef sent to help.
2004
Marooned in Iraq
Set in the aftermath of the Gulf War, when Saddam Hussein was taking out his defeat on Iraq's Kurdish population by bombing and gassing their villages, Bahman Ghobadi's film could not be more relevant. Structured as a journey from Iranian Kurdistan to Iraqi Kurdistan, undertaken by a locally famous singer and his two adult sons in search of his ex-wife — a singer who left for Iraq after the Iranian revolution prohibited her from performing in public. Devastating, but with a lovely, elusive, affirmative undertone.
2004
Capturing the Friedmans
Andrew Jarecki's startling documentary offers an approach to truth as richly nuanced but ultimately as futile as Kurosawa's great Rashomon. In 1987, in Great Neck, Long Island, the police arrested a beloved retired schoolteacher, Arnold Friedman, and his son Jesse on charges of sexually abusing young boys. Jarecki interviews the police, attorneys, judge, and alleged victims, but the heart of the movie is the family's own footage — voluminous home movies shot by the oldest Friedman boy throughout the crisis. Before our astounded eyes the entire fantastic mess unfolds like a bloody Greek legend.
2004
Whale Rider
The stoic mysticism of Niki Caro's cool-handed, New Zealand-set charmer, in which Pai, a young Maori, has to overcome resistance to her assuming her familial destiny as the leader of her tribe, is wickedly absorbing. Much of its power comes from the delicate charisma of Keisha Castle-Hughes, making her acting debut as Pai — her instinctive underplaying gives the film an added gravity. The lush, remote landscape serves as an entrancing contrast, and director Caro leaves it to viewers to be seduced by its daunting power rather than overwhelming them with it.
2004 – 2005 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $35.00
2004
Monsieur Ibrahim
Omar Sharif sparkles in the title role of a wise and worldly Muslim shop owner who befriends — and ultimately adopts — a troubled Jewish teenager named Momo in this gently moving drama set in 1960s Paris. Taking Momo under his wing when the boy's morbidly depressed father abandons him, Ibrahim offers not just love but real insight into the mysteries of life.
2004
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter … and Spring
Like Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience," this Buddhist fable has a lyrical simplicity that masks its deep insight into human experience. Filmed at a mountain lake in a South Korean nature preserve, it follows an elderly monk and his young acolyte through the stages of the life cycle and the seasons of the calendar. The placid surface of Kim Ki-duk's lovely film is disturbed by eruptions of intense emotion, and by an intrusive soundtrack. But the film — with its moments of sharp humor and the beguiling appearances of a white cat, a wry turtle, and a quizzical rooster — is both sensual and austere, an exercise in spiritual discipline that sharpens your perception of human nature and the natural world.
2004
The Station Agent
Writer-director Tom McCarthy has turned his attention to a New Jersey backwater and come up with something lyrical, taciturn, and stripped of sentimentality. Peter Dinklage plays Fin, a dwarf who inherits a cabin-like home beside a railroad track and is none too thrilled when his quiet space is invaded. Over time, though, he warms to the invaders: Joe (Bobby Cannavale), loud and lonely, who sells coffee and hot dogs from a neighboring van, and Olivia (Patricia Clarkson), a painter still mourning the loss of a young son. The three fall in with one another, then fall out, then gradually fall back in. Like the best short stories, the picture evades grandeur, lingering on what nearly happens. None of the central performers puts a foot wrong.
2005
The Clay Bird
Probably an unusual but perhaps apt time for this intelligent drama, easily one of the finest pictures of 2003 or any other year. Tareque Masud's expansive fluidity is rapturous, inspired equally by Satyajit Ray and Abbas Kiarostami. Set in Bangladesh in the 1960s, The Clay Bird questions the nature of dedication to Islam — it doesn't attack fealty but eventually rebukes zealotry by showing a boy's reaction to his father's recent total immersion. Mr. Masud's sensitivity gives the film a pungent emotional clarity; he recognizes that naivety isn't a province only of childhood.
2005
Kitchen Stories
It is easy to imagine Bent Hamer's charming comedy as a Warner Bros. cartoon — Swedish scientist Folke as Elmer Fudd and his Norwegian subject Isak as Bugs Bunny. The tone of Hamer's dry, gentle tale couldn't be less antic, but the battle between the two has a timeless feel, as if post-WWII antagonism between Swedes and Norwegians is just a stand-in for any cultural misunderstanding. Transplanted from his home to study the cooking habits of the Norwegian bachelor, Folke lives in a teardrop-shaped camp in Isak's yard, ascending a tennis-umpire-style chair to spy on him from the corner of his kitchen. The film has visual flair to match its wry wit, and a beating heart under its frosty Nordic surface.
2005
My Architect: A Son's Journey
A traditional quest, superbly told. Nathaniel Kahn seeks to understand the life of his father, the architect Louis I. Kahn, a task made even more difficult by the fact that Kahn had three separate and coexisting families. Nathaniel was an illegitimate son and only 11 when his father died; his interviews are laced with raw, uncut feeling for a man he never really knew. Throughout the documentary, he uses Kahn's buildings as a kind of wedge into his father's motivations and personality. He discovers that Kahn's more famous contemporaries, like I. M. Pei, appear haunted by his career. Perhaps more surprisingly, the women in Kahn's life don't regret the way he treated them.
2005
Since Otar Left
Although the title character of Julie Bertuccelli's film is seen only fleetingly in blurry snapshots, his presence haunts the imaginations of the three women at the center of this beautifully written and acted drama. Otar, a medical student from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, has fled the bleak, crumbling city of Tbilisi to live in Paris without a visa. Left behind are his doting mother, his sister, and his sister's daughter. Like Chekhov's Three Sisters, Since Otar Left is about yearning as a life force. When word comes that Otar has died in a construction accident, the sister and granddaughter, afraid to break the news, put on a charade — writing bogus letters that eventually spur the mother to journey to Paris to see her son.
2005
The Return
This first feature by Andrei Zvyagintsev has the startling, irrepressible quality of the best debuts. A pair of brothers — young Ivan and the teenage Andrey — live peacefully in a fatherless household in a brackish backwater of what used to be the Soviet Union. In the midst of an idle summer, their father turns up from nowhere and starts, with minimum benevolence, to reestablish his authority. Andrey responds well to such tyranny, while Ivan glowers at the treacherous interloper. Most of the film takes place on a fishing trip that ripples with threat and thrill alike. Zvyagintsev gets formidable concentration from his youthful actors, and his storytelling moves with the simplicity — calm, chiseled, and suggestive — of a fable.
2005
Twilight Samurai
If Laura Ingalls Wilder could write a samurai movie it might look like this thoroughly delightful and completely absorbing family film from veteran director Yoji Yamada. Hiroyuki Sanada plays Seibei, a low-ranking samurai in feudal 19th-century Japan — a hopelessly untidy widower who must look after his elderly mother and two small daughters on his own. Then he finds out his childhood sweetheart has come back to her hometown, having been divorced from her drunken husband. You will be on the edge of your seat for the showdown, and for the rest of the film. It is terrific, old-fashioned storytelling with a rich sense of time and place.
2005 – 2006 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $35.00
2005
Maria Full of Grace
In this superbly poised independent film, María (Catalina Sandino Moreno), a willful 17-year-old, unhappily pregnant and stuck in a factory job, agrees to serve as a "mule," carrying pellets of heroin from her native Colombia to New Jersey. Joshua Marston, a 35-year-old NYU film-school graduate, nosed around Colombia and New York's immigrant neighborhoods before shooting his first feature, and the way he dramatized the material seems instinctively right: step by step, detail by detail, emotion by emotion, eliding nothing, exaggerating nothing. In his calm and lucid way, he has made one of the emblematic coming-to-America stories of our time.
2005
The Motorcycle Diaries
In 1952, Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old chemist, and his pal Ernesto Guevara, a 23-year-old medical student, set out from Buenos Aires to explore South America. Walter Salles's film, based on their notebooks, is partly a political coming-of-age story in which Ernesto (Gael García Bernal) awakens to the injustice that plagues the continent. But the movie is also a rambunctious buddy picture, a breathtaking travelogue, and an unusual love story — Ernesto's sensual and spiritual connection to the continent itself, beautifully communicated through Éric Gautier's sublime cinematography. The real stars of the movie are the rugged Chilean highlands, the peaks of the Andes, and the misty banks of the Peruvian Amazon.
2005
The Sea Inside
The director Alejandro Amenábar's follow-up to The Others is the true-life story of Ramón Sampedro, a quadriplegic who led a campaign in favor of his right to die. As Sampedro, Javier Bardem gives a small miracle of a performance. Confined to his bed, unable to move, Bardem has an uncanny ability to express mystery and resilience. The movie centers on Sampedro's loving family and the two women who try to change his life. The dialogue is, at times, poetic, and there's a moving, somnambulistic feel to the film as it slowly drifts asleep.
2006
Born into Brothels
Zana Briski, a New York photojournalist, spent several years in the red-light district of Calcutta, where she ran a photography class for the children of prostitutes, encouraging them to document the squalor and the vibrant humanity that surrounded them. The seven children featured in this lovely documentary are not only her subjects but her collaborators, and it is thrilling to watch them discover their own artistic talents. This flowering is counterposed with a chronicle of Briski's efforts to get the children out of the red-light district and into boarding school — yielding both optimism and a recognition of just how cruel and intractable the conditions facing these children really are.
2006
Walk on Water
Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi), a hard-bitten and sardonic Mossad agent, gets assigned to two young Germans visiting Israel — a brother and sister whose flower-child tolerance infuriates him. Yet he takes the assignment: the grandfather of these two is an unimaginably ancient Nazi war criminal living in Argentina, and the Mossad wants the old man dead. This gentle but ambitious Israeli film is a political thriller that turns into a moral fable. Axel, who is gay and as open-hearted as Eyal is embittered, pulls the agent out of his shell, and the movie — in Axel's spirit of reconciliation — tries to put an end to the Nazi era once and for all, and also to end the Israeli insistence on vengeance.
2006
Nobody Knows
Based on the true story of four children abandoned by their mother in a small Tokyo apartment, Hirokazu Kore-eda's fourth film is at once harrowing and tender — an urban horror story with overtones of fairy tale. Restricting himself to the children's point of view, the director creates an almost unbearable sense of dread; you can't help but suspect that, at every moment, something terrible is about to happen. But at the same time, because the children themselves do not perceive the full terribleness of their situation, the terror is mitigated by a sense of wonder and adventure. The key is Kore-eda's deft camera sense and the remarkable performance of 12-year-old Yūya Yagira as Akira, the oldest sibling.
2006
Vera Drake
In its limited way, perfect. The title character in Mike Leigh's film is a middle-aged cleaning lady (Imelda Staunton) who races through her London working-class neighborhood singing to herself. The time is 1950, and though the dark and depressed city still suffers from wartime austerities, Vera brings the light. And it is precisely in that selfless and attentive way — brisk, efficient, consoling — that Vera, using a tube and a noxious solution, terminates one unwanted pregnancy after another. Leigh evokes an entire way of life — the grave and stoical spirit of the English working class — with an almost preternatural calm. The movie is hushed and intense.
2006
Moolaadé
Ousmane Sembène, the 81-year-old Senegalese filmmaker often referred to as the father of African cinema, is a patriarch with evident feminist sympathies. Set in a village in Burkina Faso, his latest film tackles the subject of female genital mutilation, but its political resonance is hardly limited to Africa. Collé, the tough-minded second wife of a village elder, offers protection to four young girls who have fled the knives and starts a revolution. In chronicling her struggle with male power and deeply rooted tradition, Sembène also paints a rich and complex tableau of village life, giving the film a remarkable buoyancy of spirit. An example of humanist cinema at its finest.
2006
The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill
The true story of a bohemian St. Francis and his remarkable relationship with a flock of wild green-and-red parrots. Mark Bittner, a homeless street musician in San Francisco, falls in love with the flock as he searches for meaning in his life, unaware that the wild parrots will bring him everything he needs. The film celebrates urban wildness, bohemian and avian, and links the parrots' antics to human behavior. A surprise ending ties the themes together and completes Mark's search for meaning.
2006 – 2007 Season
Theater, Communication Arts Building, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $35.00
2006
Junebug
Watching Junebug, a wise, bittersweet, beautifully acted comedy about a Southern homecoming, should bring to mind thoughts of Thomas Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again. George Johnston (Alessandro Nivola) is a lean Southern golden boy who has flown the family coop to live in Chicago. His return to his parents' North Carolina homestead after a three-year absence is an extension of a business trip undertaken by his beautiful, cultivated new wife Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz), who is everything George's family is not. If the homecoming lands the couple in the thick of America's culture wars, Junebug is much too subtle and knowing a film to turn its characters into talk-show clichés. We get to know these people deeply.
2006
Travellers and Magicians
There probably aren't too many directors with a résumé like Khyentse Norbu — a Bhutanese nobleman regarded as one of the most important incarnate lamas in Tibetan Buddhism. In this breathtakingly lovely film, Norbu takes viewers deep into his remote homeland of Bhutan, the reported inspiration for Shangri-La in Lost Horizon. With dazzling cinematography by Alan Kozlowski, Norbu captures images of surpassing beauty, yet the dramatic Himalayan scenery never overwhelms his beguiling depiction of two men consumed by dreams of better lives. The secular humanist Dondup, a petty government official, learns to suspect his affection for all things Western and regain a respect for traditional Buddhist ways.
2006
Caché (Hidden)
Winner of the Cannes Best Director Award, Michael Haneke's psychological thriller centers on wealthy French couple Georges (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche), who begin receiving threatening videotapes and phone calls. Eventually Georges realizes who the perpetrator is but refuses to tell Anne, causing a rift. Flashbacks of George's childhood reveal the mystery, illuminating France's damaged relations with Algeria. Caché is Haneke's masterpiece: a compelling politico-psychological essay about the denial and guilt mixed into the foundations of western prosperity, composed and filmed with remarkable technique.
2007
L'Enfant
For the past decade, the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have been building one of the most passionately engaged bodies of work in contemporary cinema. L'Enfant opens with Sonia, a pretty young blonde with a newborn son, Jimmy, in tow, anxiously searching for her boyfriend Bruno. When she finds him, he greets her warmly but barely registers the mewling bundle in her arms. The next day, while Sonia's attention is directed elsewhere, Bruno sells Jimmy on the black market. Like Robert Bresson's Pickpocket, the Dardennes are not interested in passing judgment on a grievously flawed character — what interests them is whether a man like this, having committed such a repellent offense, can find redemption.
2007 Documentary Weekend — January 12 & 13
Members only · No additional charge
6:30 PM
The Beauty Academy of Kabul
In the summer of 2004, a group of volunteer American hairstylists, financed by the beauty industry, arrived in Afghanistan to open a school. Director Liz Mermin documents the hilarious, moving, and sometimes fractious meeting of diametrically different cultures — one that has suffered unimaginable horrors, and one that believes a good perm is the answer to everything. Though you may squirm at the Americans' shockingly insensitive behavior, there's no doubt that over the curling rods a kind of healing is taking place. Despite terrible memories of Taliban-sanctioned mutilations, the Afghan women prove to be as enthusiastically vain as we are.
8:30 PM
An Inconvenient Truth
Davis Guggenheim's documentary is not really about Al Gore. It consists mainly of a multimedia presentation on climate change that Gore has given many times over the last few years, interspersed with voice-over reflections on his life in and out of politics. His explanations of complex environmental phenomena are clear, and while some of the visual aids are a little corny, most of the images are stark, illuminating, and powerful. As unsettling as it can be, the film is also intellectually exhilarating, and like any good piece of pedagogy, whets the appetite for further study. This is a good place to start, and to continue, a process of education that could hardly be more urgent.
6:30 PM
Boys of Baraka
The Boys of Baraka gives a poignant human face to an alarming statistic: 76 percent of Black male students in Baltimore city schools do not graduate from high school. The documentary, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, tells you why. In this experimental program, 20 "at risk" 12- and 13-year-old Black male students are transported 10,000 miles to the Baraka School in rural Kenya — founded in 1996 on a 150-acre ranch where there is no television or full-time electricity, offering academic instruction and strict but gentle discipline in an environment where giraffes and zebras roam. The film follows four of the students during their first year away from home, and is so rich you wish there were more of it.
8:30 PM
Lost Boys of Sudan
As Peter and Santino, Sudanese orphans, prepare to leave their refugee camp in Kenya for a new life in the United States, a tribal elder tells them: "Don't act like those people who wear the baggy jeans, who do all the bad things in America." It's a startling and prescient statement, encapsulating both the welter of American race relations and the sense of obligation the boys will feel to the people left behind. Documentary filmmakers Megan Mylan and Jon Shenk follow the pair for a year as they adjust to a "land called Texas." Like those of many immigrants, their experiences are bittersweet.
2007
Tsotsi
After shooting a woman and driving off in her car, a ruthless Johannesburg thug known only as Tsotsi is surprised to discover a crying infant in the backseat. Unable to leave the child behind, he grudgingly takes it home, and through his efforts to care for the baby, Tsotsi slowly rediscovers his compassion, self-respect, and capacity to love. Tsotsi is a positive movie, with a message of redemption, and carries a decent faith that the shantytowns of South Africa are not simply places of despair but communities where poverty does not rule out the possibility of doing the right thing. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, 2005.
2007
Syrian Bride
In Eran Riklis's warm-hearted comedy about the bureaucratic madness engendered by Middle East conflicts, Mona, a Druze woman in the Golan Heights, is about to move to Damascus to marry a Syrian television actor — which will make it impossible for her to see her family again. The story is elevated by the fierce, noble performances of Hiam Abbass as Mona's older sister Amal, the family's moral center, and by a large multinational troupe of actors who seem deeply committed to the simple fact of working together. In the end this film is a why-can't-we-all-get-along dream, its sweetness embittered by the common knowledge that it remains a dream.
2007
Water
Set in 1938 in the twilight of colonial India, Water focuses on a group of women condemned by Hindu law to spend the rest of their lives in an ashram on the banks of the Ganges because they are widows. Written and directed by Deepa Mehta, it is an exquisite film about the institutionalized oppression of an entire class of women and the way patriarchal imperatives inform religious belief. Serene on the surface yet roiling underneath, the film neatly parallels the plight of widows under Hindu fundamentalism to that of India under British colonialism. Though Gandhi and his followers are an insistent background presence, the movie is never didactic, trusting the simple rhythms of the women's lives to tell their story.
2007
Army of Shadows
The tightest thriller in town. Jean-Pierre Melville is widely worshipped for his gangster sagas, but this tale of the French Resistance — no less stylish, hats and dark suits still abound — has an added pulse of the heartfelt. It stars Lino Ventura as a stalwart of the underground movement. What concerns Melville is the courage of the stoical, the phlegmatic, and the formidably organized. His direction honors that efficiency with a series of set pieces — one in a barber shop, another at Gestapo headquarters, a third in the face of a firing squad — in which the suspense grows almost intolerable. The movie was made in 1969 but never previously released in the United States. With an unflappable Simone Signoret.
2007
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont
The great Joan Plowright plays an elderly lady who books into a London residential hotel to gain some independence. Mrs. Palfrey's grandson ignores her telephone messages, but a young man who lives in a basement flat nearby (Rupert Friend) becomes her confidant, and she persuades him to play the role of her grandson. A sweet, warm, elegiac comedy in which old age is allowed to be old age, without plastic surgery or hip-hop grannies.
2007 Season
Smith Theater, Howard Community College · Five Fridays/Saturdays · $20.00 · Abridged season due to theater renovation
2007
The Lives of Others
The first feature from young German director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck starts in 1984, in East Berlin. A successful playwright (Sebastian Koch) and his girlfriend (Martina Gedeck), hitherto trusted by the state, are placed under Stasi surveillance. Their investigator, a lonely ascetic named Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe), is told to entrap them — instead of which, little by little, he lets them off the hook. Given the movie's cross-weave of envy, terror, paranoia, and endangered principle, the outcome after two and a half hours remains taut and clear; by the end you feel exhausted and oddly uplifted. Winner of the 2006 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
2007
After the Wedding
Director Susanne Bier and screenwriter Anders Thomas Jensen continue their winning streak with this 2006 feature. It stars Mads Mikkelsen as a humanitarian trying to save his orphanage in India from going under. He travels to Copenhagen to meet a millionaire (Rolf Lassgård) interested in financing the project, only to learn that the businessman has a more personal motive for bringing him to Denmark. After the Wedding builds on what appears initially as a rickety foundation with such dexterity and grace that it eventually emerges as a deeply moving experience.
2007
Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
In her remarkable debut film, young Bosnian writer-director Jasmila Žbanić deftly tells the story of a single mother, Esma (Mirjana Karanović, in a radiant performance), and her adolescent daughter Sara, who live in Grbavica — a former war internment camp in Sarajevo, stunningly photographed in shades of gray. Sara takes great pride in her belief that her father was a war martyr and asks Esma for documentation attesting to this, which will get her a free pass for her class trip. Žbanić infuses the simple plot with subtle insights into the psyche of a people trying to heal.
2007
Away from Her
In a refreshingly direct, unassuming manner, Away from Her considers two great human mysteries: the persistence of love and the workings of the brain. It takes the twilight of a long, mostly happy marriage as a vantage point from which to look back at youth and forward into the waiting darkness. The first feature written and directed by Sarah Polley, the film is by turns sharp and somber, alive to the lacerations of ordinary experience and quietly attentive to grand absurdities and small instances of grace. "A little bit of grace" is what Fiona, a slender and elegant woman with Alzheimer's disease, counsels in response to its ravages — and grace is what Julie Christie manifests in every scene.
Dec 1, 2007
Once
Against the trend of lavish song-and-dance spectacles, Once — a scrappy, heart-on-its-sleeve little movie directed by John Carney — makes a persuasive case that the real future of the musical may lie not in splashy grandeur but in modesty and understatement. Filmed on the streets of Dublin, the movie does not look, sound, or feel like a typical musical. It is realistic rather than fanciful, and the characters work patiently on the songs rather than bursting spontaneously into them. But its low-key affect and decidedly human scale endow Once with an easy, lovable charm that a flashier production could never have achieved. The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes, and not a single false note.
2008 – 2009 Season
Smith Theater, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $35.00 · New 5:30 P.M. Friday showing
2008
The Counterfeiters
The Austrian winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar is the true story of Salomon Sorowitsch (Karl Markovics), the most skilled counterfeiter in prewar Berlin — a Russian-born Jew, arrested in 1936 and eventually placed at the head of Operation Bernhard, a counterfeiting workshop run by the SS and staffed by Jewish prisoners. His unit produces the British pound in bulk, but his perfect design for the dollar is sabotaged by a Communist printer who can't bring himself to help the German war effort. The movie is devoted to Sally's genius for survival and his efforts to prevent the heroic saboteur from attaining the martyrdom he appears to long for. A testament to guile.
2008
Flight of the Red Balloon
The latest wonderment from Taiwanese master Hou Hsiao-hsien takes as one of its inspirations Albert Lamorisse's 1956 classic The Red Balloon. There is a young boy in this film too, Simon, a moppet with sandy hair and serious eyes who lives with his mother Suzanne (Juliette Binoche) in a tiny bourgeois-bohemian Parisian flat bursting with books and bric-a-brac. Hou's films can be crushingly sad; as with Bresson and Ozu, his restraint only deepens the emotional power of his work. But whether because of that red balloon — which alternately invokes the spirit of liberty and its elusiveness — or because he was practicing his art in one of the world's most beautiful cities, Hou has made a film that is, to borrow a line from one of his characters, "a bit happy and a bit sad."
2009
4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days
A ferocious, unsentimental, often brilliantly directed film about a young woman who helps a friend secure an illegal abortion in Ceaușescu's Romania. The camera doesn't follow the action — it expresses consciousness itself. This consciousness, alert to the world and insistently alive, is embodied by a young university student who, one wintry day in the late 1980s, helps her roommate with a procedure that was not uncommon and too often fatal. A pitiless, violent story that in its telling becomes a haunting intellectual and aesthetic achievement. It marks the emergence of an important new talent in Romanian writer-director Cristian Mungiu.
2009
The Edge of Heaven
There are six principal characters in The Edge of Heaven: two mothers, two daughters, a father and a son, all arranged in more or less symmetrical pairs. In the course of this extraordinary film by German writer-director Fatih Akın — which won the Best Screenplay award at Cannes — children are lost, lost parents are never found, and generational and geographical distances grow wider. Yet at the same time, as the lives of the characters cross and entwine, there is a sense of human connections becoming stronger and thicker, of a fragile moral order coalescing beneath the randomness and cruelty of modern life. And even as the movie bristles with violence, its tone is curiously gentle.
2009
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
In 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor of French Elle, suffered a massive stroke at age 43 that left him able to move nothing but his left eye. The little book that Bauby composed by blinking while a secretary ran through the alphabet serves as the basis for this astounding movie, directed by Julian Schnabel and written by Ronald Harwood. At first we see only what Bauby (Mathieu Amalric) sees: a blur of faces floating into view like deep-sea monsters. Consciousness arrives. But then, by degrees, the movie opens up to the great world: his past, his fantasies and dreams. The associations are wild and free, yet nothing feels arbitrary or showy — the film is, in the end, an overwhelming sensual experience.
2009
Chop Shop
Because the last shot of Ramin Bahrani's Chop Shop is as quiet and matter-of-fact as most of the rest of the film, it takes a moment to register as a metaphor. For nearly an hour and a half we have been immersed in the rhythms of daily life in the battered Willets Point section of Queens, the hand-held camera studiously fixed at street level. Now, all of a sudden, it pitches upward to follow a flock of pigeons breaking toward the sky. Like its prosaic title, Chop Shop dwells mainly in the realm of the literal. Yet there is nonetheless a lyricism at its heart — an unsentimental, soulful appreciation of the grace that resides in even the meanest struggle for survival.
2009
The Visitor
When we first meet Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins), he is in a state of emotional inertia that clinicians might identify as depression. A professor of economics at Connecticut College and a widower, Walter plods through an existence that looks comfortable and easy enough, but also profoundly tedious. When he reluctantly travels to New York to deliver a paper at a conference, he finds his rarely visited Manhattan apartment has been surreptitiously rented to Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), a drummer from Syria, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), his Senegalese girlfriend. Walter's initial dismay gives way to an instinctive flicker of compassion. The curious thing about The Visitor is that even as it goes more or less where you think it will, it still manages to surprise you along the way.
2009
Roman de Gare
A witty yet ultimately poignant guessing game in which nobody is quite what he or she seems — arguably Claude Lelouch's (A Man and a Woman) best film. Its title translates as "airport novel" and Lelouch pays homage to the lure of high adventure by mining one of his typically extravagant plots for both humor and pathos, raising provocative questions of identity and the confusion of truth and fiction. Roman de Gare is the rare trick film in which all the tricks reveal something amusing, involving, or poignant about its characters.
2009
The Band's Visit
Not a musical comedy but a low-key study of thwarted musicians, touched with comic grace. Written and directed by Eran Kolirin, it tells of an Egyptian police band that gets badly lost on a trip to Israel. The traveling musicians wind up in a desert town, dependent on the mercy of Dina (Ronit Elkabetz), the owner of a local café, who feeds them and finds them places to sleep. Their entire stay requires a delicate maintenance of dignity on both sides; the peace between old enemies is all the funnier for being so frail. The music, when it finally strikes up, has an air of quiet celebration, and rightly so.
2009 – 2010 Season
Smith Theater, Howard Community College · Nine Fridays/Saturdays · $35.00
2009
Goodbye Solo
A taxi passenger named William (Red West), perhaps seventy, a pouchy-eyed white Southerner, demands to be taken in a week's time to a mountain perch outside the city called Blowing Rock. We're in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the driver Solo (Souleymane Sy Savane), a Senegalese immigrant — young, handsome, and endlessly cheerful — refuses to help William carry out his apparent plan for suicide. The independent writer-director Ramin Bahrani establishes the streets of Winston-Salem clearly, yet the movie lifts off into an existential fable: one man's exuberant embrace of life crashes into the other's adamant rejection of it. Red West has a voice like raw whiskey; Savane's smile lights up any space he inhabits. You will think of them both for days after seeing the movie.
2009
Departures
The 2008 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film follows Daigo Kobayashi, a devoted cellist whose orchestra has just been dissolved. Moving back to his old hometown with his wife to start over, he answers a classified ad thinking it is for a travel agency, only to discover the job is for a nōkanshi — a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life. While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of the nōkanshi, acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death. The film follows his profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy, and meaning of life and living.
2009
Moscow, Belgium
Ordinary Matty has nothing but three kids to her name. She works at the post office, and her husband has run off to the bedroom of one of his students. At 43, life is pretty hopeless. Then she gets into a fender-bender at the grocery store with 29-year-old Johnny. After some harsh words, Johnny finds himself enamored with Matty, who finds that she likes being wanted and decides to take a chance on him. A romance ensues just as the wandering husband comes home. Now Matty finds she is the center of attention and must choose between settling back into the life she was leading or breaking into something new. This heartfelt movie is covered in subtle humor, making the story like a well-made meal.
2010
Lemon Tree
Eran Riklis's engaging human drama of one woman's struggle to preserve her way of life in the midst of political turmoil. The wonderful Hiam Abbass (The Visitor) is Salma, a Palestinian widow who earns her living tending to her late father's lemon grove. When an Israeli government minister moves next door and declares the grove a potential security threat, Salma struggles to defend her peaceful livelihood. Personal drama gives way to political controversy as Salma forms an unexpected bond with the minister's lonely wife and takes her protest — with the help of her young lawyer — all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court.
2010
Everlasting Moments
Jan Troell's Swedish film (best known for 1971's The Emigrants) will stun you with simple pleasures: a naturally lit kitchen, a country dance captured austerely from a respectful distance. The drama starts in 1907 and, to its absorbing credit, feels like it wasn't made long thereafter. Maria loves her family and her husband Sigge, who is a womanizer and a drunk. After Sigge is fired from the dock, Maria hopes to pawn her old camera — but the polite shop owner shows her how to use it, awakening in her an idea of art, of a community of sensitive people, and subtly but profoundly, a notion of control. Troell, serving as his own cinematographer, takes Maria's modest approach as his own.
2010
The Secret of the Grain
Slimane Beiji, the sad, still center of Abdellatif Kechiche's bustling and brilliant film, might be described as an accidental patriarch. A stubborn, taciturn immigrant from Tunisia, he has spent 35 years working in the shipyards of Sète — a rough little French port city on the Mediterranean coast. His large, cantankerous family lives mostly in a battered high-rise housing project. The richness of The Secret of the Grain lies in the close, tireless, enthusiastic attention it pays to the most mundane daily tasks, especially those involving food — above all the fish couscous, the mullet collected by Slimane from his fisherman friends and delivered faithfully to the important women in his life.
2010
Sugar
There is something undeniably noble and beautiful about the love of sports: the appreciation of grace and excellence for their own sakes. But the practice of big-time sports is often cruel and corrupt, a business built on the exploitation of young people and the peddling of impossible dreams. This basic contradiction is the central concern of Sugar, a wise and lovely film by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck. Following a young pitcher from a training camp in the Dominican Republic to a minor-league club in Iowa and beyond, the film is infused with a deep affection for baseball, whose rhythms are nimbly captured by a narrative pace that quickens and relaxes as necessary.
2010
The Class
François Bégaudeau, a teacher in a Paris public school in the Twentieth Arrondissement, published a novel in 2006 chronicling a year in his classroom. Along with director Laurent Cantet and writer Robin Campillo, he condensed and reshaped the material into a two-hour drama centering on the teacher (Bégaudeau, playing himself) and a small number of students — all played by actual students. The students, mostly of African or Caribbean descent, are alive to him and come back hard, questioning French notions of discipline and manners. In all, The Class is a prime document of French post-colonial blues, though its relevance to American urban education could not be any greater if it had been shot in the Bronx or South Los Angeles.
2010
Tulpan
If you see only one comic love story from Kazakhstan this year, choose this prize-winning honey. Tulpan is the saga of Asa, a shy young man who searches for a wife under extreme conditions. He's a nomadic shepherd just returned from military service, the Kazakh steppe he calls home is vast and empty beyond imagining, and the only eligible young lady for miles around — her name's Tulpan — rejects him because of his big ears. There's no room for mush in filmmaker Sergey Dvortsevoy's triumphant, intimate drama, not when the necessities of daily life are so elemental, and so tenderly observed.