Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: high museum of art, guest blogger, Tags, 25th Latin American Film Festival, Carancho, Pablo Trapero, Ricardo Darin, Martina Gusman, Buenos Aires, films from Argentina
Carancho shows on Saturday, October 30 at 8 p.m. in the Rich Theatre as part of the High’s 25th annual Latin American Film Festival
by Julie Chautin
“They’re like the Chilean miners down in a dark hole,” Linda Dubler said to me. We were talking about the main characters in Carancho, the film that brings the 25th Latin American Film Festival to a thrilling conclusion.
This time the hole is one that an ambulance-chasing lawyer and a doctor with a drug problem have dug for themselves. They traverse the streets of Buenos Aires in Argentinean director Pablo Trapero’s thriller. And you wonder if they will make it out.
Sosa (the incredible Ricardo Darin) has lost his license to practice law. To get by, he works with a dubious organization called the “Federation.” It sues insurance companies on behalf of poor accident victims, although most of the money from the insurers goes to the Federation, not the victims. Even the hospitals are in on the payoffs. Sosa is the carancho, or vulture, on the lookout for victims.
Lujan (the equally incredible Martina Gusman, wife of the director) is an emergency room doctor new in town. She endures long blistering hours, hassles with administration, and physical assaults by patients. Drugs are her secret source of comfort.
Sosa and Lujan meet at an accident scene one night. His eyes light up but she is wary. When they meet again, Sosa offers her a plea straight from his heart, “How can I change the way you look at me?”
The road may be rocky in some love stories, but this one is strewn with potholes. Sosa wants to reform his life and leave the Federation. He is in deep, however, and crawling out is no easy task.
Trapero’s films Rolling Family and Lion’s Den have been screened in previous years at the High’s Latin American Film Festival, and won numerous awards at others. Carancho is certain to win more. Darin and Gusman are exceptional. The direction and editing are swift and sure. The violent scenes are unnerving. But hope remains. One evening Sosa convinces Lujan to go out for coffee. We watch them through the window of the coffee shop, as passing car lights reflect onto the window like stars in the universe. Then a miracle happens. Sosa makes her laugh.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Anna Muylaert, Brazilian films, Caetano Velloso, Chico Buarque, E Prohibido Fumar, Gilberto Gil, Glória Pires, guest blogger, guitar music in films, high museum of art, Jorge Ben, latin american film festival, Paul Miklos, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, Villa Lobos
SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES shows on Saturday, October 23 at 8 p.m. in the Rich Theatre as part of the High’s 25th annual Latin American Film Festival
by Julie Chautin
“I don’t want St. Anthony, I want Aunt Dinah’s red sofa,” Baby shouts into the phone. She is a forty-something Sao Paulo native, a paulista, who fills her days fighting with her sisters about items from their dead aunt’s estate, such as it is. When she’s not watching infomercials, she teaches guitar lessons in her apartment to various wannabe Segovias, from a boy who won’t practice to an elderly lady slowly pinging away at the strings. Oh yes, all the while, Baby smokes — a lot.
Sao Paulo-born director Anna Muylaert’s award-winning dark comedy, Smokes Gets in Your Eyes, hits all the right notes, from its direction and screenplay to snappy editing. Even the music of Muylaert’s countrymen moves the story along. A guitar strums a samba as Baby’s cigarette smoke curls upward. Villa Lobos, Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso take their turns. Lovers differ on who they like better, the bossa nova style of Chico Buarque or the samba rock and funk of Jorge Ben.
Baby enjoys a smoke
One day a single guy rents the apartment next door to Baby. His name is Max and Baby knows he’s single because the doorman told her. How else do you get at the truth in a high-rise? Baby and Max meet outside her door. He smiles. She smiles. Guitar strings play Carmen in the background. Poof, they’re a couple.
They have things in common. They both play the guitar. They also have differences. She smokes, he doesn’t. It doesn’t take him long to make that quiet request — to quit smoking. She learns to chant that cigarettes are not her friends.
The further proof that Baby wants to make this relationship to work is in the plucking. Her sessions with the hair-waxing ladies are not to be missed.
Muylaert struck the right chords with actors Glória Pires and Paul Miklos as Baby and Max. All the while she shows us the faces of Sao Paulo. The city is filled with high-rise apartments where residents meet in the elevator. In fact, it is the elevator security tape that becomes a player in Baby’s fate.
One day while she’s alone in her apartment Baby hears low moans that seem to come from Max’s place. It turns out they are low female moans. Another truth slowly comes out courtesy of Baby’s drill.
The moaner is Max’s ex-wife. She won’t leave him alone, he complains to Baby. Jealousy consumes her, until a tragedy happens. And all the things that Baby wanted may slip away.
Brazilian film judges gave the film countless awards. There should be a special one for nailing what it’s like to drive in Sao Paulo. Traffic doesn’t move, it undulates likes waves on Rio’s Ipanema Beach. A little forward, then back, a traffic samba that will slowly dance you home.
Director Muylaert noted in an interview her admiration for the work of Stanley Kubrick. That is a head’s up to be prepared for anything. You will like Baby, laugh at her foibles, and ache for her too. You will also want to see more of Muylaert’s films in years to come.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Contracorriente, Cristian Mercado, guest blogger, high museum of art, Javier Fuentes-Leon, latin american film festival, Manolo Cardona, Peru, Peruvian films, Tatiana Astengo, Undertow
A review of Undertow by Julie Chautin
Undertow (Contracorriente) is another not-to-be-missed film in the High’s Latin American Film Festival. Javier Fuentes-León’s first feature film won the Sundance Film Festival’s Audience Award for World Cinema Drama earlier this year. It is a story full of emotion and beauty. The director captures the glistening blue sea, the wild and rocky coastline, and the intense inner turmoil of a married man in love with another man.
It was filmed in Cabo Blanco, on the coast of Peru. Peruvian director Fuentes-León, however, would have been happy if you thought it was made anywhere else.
In an interview with Jason Farbman of The Latin America News Dispatch, Fuentes-León notes that he wanted the seaside village to look “like a small town that could be set in South Africa, or Italy, or Colombia, or Thailand, or even maybe Louisiana.”
Miguel and his wife Mariela live in this pretty village where Miguel is a fisherman, like everyone else. They are expecting their first child. “Miguelito,” Miguel calls softly into Mariela’s growing tummy. They don’t know the sex of the child yet, but Miguel is sure it will be a boy.
Life revolves around the water, and so does death. Burials are done at sea in a traditional way. Miguel understands the importance of a good departure from this earth. And his friends rely on his help to assure their departed rest in peace.
So it is all the more wrenching when we discover Miguel’s secret life. He is having an affair with an artist visiting the village – a male artist. No one knows, and that’s the way Miguel must have it to survive. It’s a tightrope no one would want to be on.
When an unexpected tragedy happens, Miguel’s tightrope starts to fray.
In the interview, Fuentes-León notes that when dealing with homophobia, what may change people’s minds will always be “having somebody else next to them say, ‘hey, I’m gay,’” — someone you love or respect or admire, he adds. And not surprisingly, those are the feelings I have for Miguel.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: films, high museum of art, latin american film festival, Linda Dubler, media arts, movies
Alamar screens on Friday, September 24 at 8 p.m. in the Rich Theatre.
By Linda Dubler. Interview by David Jenkins.
- Jorge and Natan in Alamar
Alamar is a love story about the relationship between a father and his young son and their connection to a way of life and a place that seem to be timeless, but are in fact fragile and endangered. Jorge, who has the profile of an Aztec warrior and the body art of a modern hipster, is calling it quits with his son’s mother, who will be taking Natan with her to live in Rome, Italy. But for a few weeks, Jorge and Natan will spend time together in a fisherman’s shack on the Gulf of Mexico, a place called Banco Chinchorro, which is home to an unspoiled coral reef. Along with an older man who Jorge addresses as “grandfather,” they’ll catch barracuda with nothing but a nylon line, hook, and bait, dive for lobster, sleep in hammocks, and court the attentions of a beautiful white egret that Natan names Blanquita — the only female in their manly company.
How much of Alamar was pre-meditated and how much unfolded in front of the camera? On the screen the film looks organic and completely unstudied.
This interview with the director, which originally appeared in Time Out London, reveals his working process. The young Mexican director explains his dreamy father-son fishing trip movie to David Jenkins.
Mexican-born director and London Film School graduate Pedro González-Rubio made his debut in 2005 with ‘Toro Negro’, a documentary about a hapless bullfighter. His new film ‘Alamar’, which picked up the top prize at the 2010 Rotterdam film festival, blends elements of documentary and fiction to tell the story of a young boy’s visit to his fisherman father.
What sort of techniques did you learn at film school that you used in ‘Alamar’?
‘Film school is good. They teach you the basics, the technical aspects of filmmaking. But it doesn’t teach you taste or give you interests. That comes from your own creativity, life and experience. I enjoy finding out about places and people who are not part of my everyday life.’
Which elements of the film did you write and which were real?
‘I came up with the idea of the trip. I also came up with the story. I didn’t write any dialogue – that’s why there hardly is any. I wanted to portray how the bond between father and son would get stronger and stronger than suddenly, when you least expect it, they get separated. When it came to the earlier scenes, where the boy is packing his bag for the trip, my direction was hands-off. I wouldn’t tell them where to sit or where to stand: they would just do it naturally. I was more like a guide.’
Can you tell us about the father?
‘Even though it feels like he comes from the area where the film is shot, it’s not true. He comes from a village in the jungle. And he doesn’t fish. The location was very important for me as it’s a very visual film and I believe that a lot can be said with a good image rather than with dialogue. I like to portray the inner qualities of the characters and the location: the innocence of the kid, the purity of the landscape and the expansiveness of nature.’
Did the presence of your camera affect the performers?
‘Not really. A bit for the father. He was very conscious of us and of his role. But when I focused more on fishing and on the physical activities in the film, he appeared more comfortable.’
The impression from Europe is that directors from Mexico form an ad hoc community. Did any other directors help out with ‘Alamar’?
‘Yeah, there’s a filmmaker named Elisa Miller. She saw my work-in-progress and she told me what worked and what didn’t. She’s seven years younger than me. She made a film called “Ver Llover”, which won the short film Palme d’Or Award in Cannes in 2008. I think I am drawn much more to this younger generation, those in their mid-twenties. The older generation would ask me, “Where’s the drama? Where’s the conflict? Where’s the structure?” So I have to tell them that it doesn’t have a structure. I’m trying to use a different language to the norm.’
Did you feel that the final product achieved what you set out to do?
‘Well, I knew that I wanted to let myself go rather than manipulating the elements in the location. I focused more on adapting to their daily routine and from there constructing a movie.’
Are you working on a new film?
‘Not exactly. I am working on something new, but I think I’m going explore love from a female perspective. These two films have been about male characters. I think the next one has to be female.’
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Ciro Guerra, Columbia, Columbian films, guest blogger, high museum of art, latin american film festival, Los Viajes del Viento, Marciano Martínez, northern Columbia, The Wind Journeys, vallenato music, Yull Núñez
By Julie Chautin
The Wind Journeys begins in a field where workers are digging a hole. A procession brings a coffin. Ignacio Carillo’s wife, the light of his life, has died. Ignacio used to travel from village to village playing his accordion and singing. Then he married and settled down. He is well known for his songs, however legends say his accordion came from the devil. The horns on the instrument make you wonder. And now his wife has been taken from him. Who else but the devil would do such a terrible deed? The depth of his mourning leaves him no choice. He will give up singing and return the accordion to its rightful owner, the man who taught him to play, far off on a mountaintop.
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The Wind Journeys
The day he leaves for the north a boy appears in the dusty desert. His name is Fermin and he wants to learn the music of the road. The last thing Ignacio wants is a boy tagging along. Fermin, however, has his mind made up.
Director Ciro Guerra’s The Wind Journeys looks and feels like poetry as it tells of Ignacio’s and Fermin’s journey. The dialogue is minimal, music abounds and the beauty of northern Columbia fills every scene. The dusty red deserts, green crested mountains, and crystal lakes will blow you away just like the gusts of wind push the man and boy along.
Director Guerra had not yet turned thirty when he made this film, so the dreams of youth are not strangers to him. But he also has the wisdom of an ancient storyteller and that is a winning combination.
Filed under: Film Series: Online, High Museum | Tags: atlanta, automobiles, beach boys, cadillac ranch, cars, high museum of art, little deuce coupe, monster truck, nuns, the allure of the automobile, top gear
We’re warming up for The Allure of the Auto, which opens March 21.
Filed under: Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, comedy, dysfunctional family, film, high museum of art, latin american film festival, Review
Nora's Will
If you missed Nora’s Will at the High’s 2009 Latin American Film Festival, here’s your chance to catch it. It screens at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on Sunday, January 17 at 1 p.m. (introduced by Linda Dubler) and Friday, January 22 at 3:40 p.m. (introduced by Eleanor Ringel Cater).
Visit www.ajff.org for more information, and read on for Eleanor’s review of the film.
Filed under: Film Series: High, Guest Blogger, Review | Tags: comedy, control-freak, dysfunctional family, high museum of art, latin american film festival, mexican film, suicide
This film will show Saturday, October 24 at 8 p.m. as part of the High Museum’s Latin American Film Festival.
We barely meet the Nora of Nora’s Will, but her presence permeates this bittersweet yet unexpectedly amusing Mexican movie.
As the title suggests, Nora spends most of the picture as a corpse. However, the “will” referred to isn’t a legal document; it’s the force of Nora’s posthumous inner control freak. This, after all, is a woman who plans ahead: she even leaves a pot of hot coffee for whoever discovers her.
Her suicide isn’t exactly unexpected. According to her longtime ex-husband, Jose (Fernando Lujan), who still lives across the street from her though they divorced 20 years ago, she’s tried to off herself 14 times before. So, losing Nora, though sad, isn’t really the point.
What to do with her body is.
You see, her timing is really bad. Passover is about to begin and due to various rites and rituals of Orthodox Jewish law, she can’t be buried for several days. In the meantime, there’s ice for her corpse and an irascible older rabbi who insists everything be done by the book. As in, THE BOOK.
Further, Nora has determined her Passover Seder will go on exactly as she planned. The table is set and the refrigerator is packed with food, each item accompanied by a post-it instructing what is to be done and how.
Much of the film’s considerable humor comes from self-proclaimed atheist and all-around curmudgeon Jose’s determination not to follow orders, be they from Nora, their adult son, the finger-waving rabbi, or even Nora’s devoted housekeeper. At one point, Jose brings in a pizza slathered in bacon as an adamantly non-Kosher snack.
As more people arrive and differing agendas collide, the film takes on an increasingly farcical tone. Yet first time director Mariana Chenillo never loses sight of the essential humanity of the situation which, at its core, is the on-going friction between those who believe and those who don’t. “All religions are the same,” Jose insists. “All manipulation and money.”
Winner of the best film direction award at the 31st Moscow International Film Festival, Nora’s Will ultimately (and unexpectedly) recalls the under-appreciated “Pieces of April,” a Thanksgiving-themed film starring a pre-TomKat Katie Holmes. In both, people of all backgrounds come together to share a special meal and a spiritual connection.
And even dear unhappy Nora finally gets to rest in peace.
Eleanor Ringel Cater
Filed under: Guest Blogger, High Museum, Top Picks | Tags: black beauty, film, high museum of art, horses, leonardo da vinci, monument, movie, out west, outback, sculpture, sforza, stallion, west
A horse is a horse.
Of course.
But a horse isn’t just a horse once you’ve glimpsed the immense sculpture that’s lately taken up residence smack in the middle of the Woodruff Arts Center’s Sifly Piazza.
A “re-imagining”, as they say in Hollywood, of a statue Leonardo Da Vinci planned but never completed to honor Francesco Sforza, the Duke of Milan, the stallion prances and preens, as if he knew his A-list heritage. Da Vinci worked 17 years on the piece, making numerous small sketches analyzing equine anatomy (apparently, he didn’t have a horse of his own, though Michelangelo did). It’s believed the animal was meant to be an Andalusian, a horse with a notably thick arched neck because that was the breed favored by his patron.
Passing by it every day has put me in a horse-y frame of mind. Here are some movie suggestions to help your own inner equine soar.
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron
In this animated feature (part hand-drawn, part CGI), a spirited wild mustang finds friends and foes –and love — on the wide prairies of the Old West. Unlike many other animated characters, from Lady and the Tramp to Bambi, these animals don’t talk. Rather, Matt Damon provides a folksy narration that’s reminiscent of The Vanishing Prairie. The animation is quite wonderful, including an out-of-control train hauling logs that’s as breathless as anything in an Indiana Jones movie. And it’s blessedly free of Shrek-ian jokiness and double entendres. If anyone asks, the model for Spirit was a three-year-old Kiger stallion named Donner.
White Mane
White Mane
Recently given a brief theatrical run as a companion piece to another unforgettable French short, The Red Balloon, this lesser-known live-action film from the same director, Albert Lamorisse offers its own enchantments. Filmed in 1953 in the Camargue, it is a more rigorous movie than The Red Balloon, and considerably darker. A fisherman’s young son befriends a wild white stallion and tries to protect him from hunters. But as in Into the West, wild white stallions don’t come without risks.
The Man From Snowy River
Except for the occasional “mate” and mustangs called “brumbies,” you’d hardly know this endearingly straightforward and unabashedly old-fashioned western was made in the ’80s in Australia instead of the ’30s in Hollywood. The name star is Kirk Douglas, double-cast as two feuding brothers (one bearded and one-legged; the other beardless and 2-legged). But the movie is really about an orphan’s coming-of-age in the Outback in the late 1800s. It’s a handsome movie with lots of fresh air atmosphere and a veritable tumult of horses streaming by the camera like a subway train with no brakes. Again and again. When was the last time you saw a movie in which a stallion actually reared on a cliff? Spin and Marty couldn’t do it better.
Black Beauty
Black Beauty
A true beauty. This classy adaptation of Anna Sewell’s 1877 novel is a delight for animal lovers of all ages. An equine-eye view of a horse’s life in Victorian England, the movie follows Beauty from idyllic run-wild-run-free foalhood through a series of owners good, bad and indifferent. Some, like the poor but good-hearted cabbie played by Harry Potter’s David Thewlis, treat animals with kindness and respect. Others, like the spoiled society matron played by Eleanor Bron, willingly break the animal’s back, neck and spirit in the name of fashion. Screenwriter Caroline Thompson (everything from Edward Scissorhands to The Secret Garden) doubles as director, capturing both the period flavor and the non-human perspective of the book. And while horses may be less central to our lives these days, there’s a timelessness about Beauty’s story—along with the expected enchantment of horses running through a meadow. Parental guidance: some scenes of animal mistreatment may disturb the very young.
The Black Stallion
Like nothing you’ve ever seen and better than almost anything you have. This is a stunning movie whose unique appeal is rooted in the pure visual power of film itself. The plot: a boy (Kelly Reno) and a savage stallion survive a shipwreck, establish a mystical bond on an island paradise and return home to win the Big Race. However, a plot summary says nothing of the adventure and romance, the poetry and mystery which are what the movie is really about. A film to cherish. And see again.
Into the West
Imagine The Black Stallion with a mystic Celtic lilt and you’ll have some idea of the tone of this wondrous film. Directed by Mike Newell (Enchanted April) and written by Jim Sheridan (My Left Foot), the movie is about two young brothers who flee the appalling squalor of their Dublin tenement and ride west on the back of a magical white horse. In pursuit are their dad, Gabriel Byrne, a sodden, embittered widower who’s forsaken his traveler’s roots; a gypsy tracker (Ellen Barkin) who cares for Byrne and his boys; a greedy businessman who wants the horse as a show jumper; and half the country’s police force. Superbly balanced between gritty realism and fantastical lyricism, the movie is both poignant and unexpectedly funny. And, as anyone who knows the legend of the Kelpie, a bit chilling This is NOT a kids-only picture. Treat yourself.
Eleanor Ringel Cater
Filed under: Film Series: High, Review | Tags: documentary, high museum of art, latin american film festival, Review
In preparation for the 24th Annual Latin American Film Festival, let’s take a look back at a recent review of Oblivion by Linda Dubler. This film is the second in the festival and will be shown at 8 p.m. on Saturday, September 26.
Child acrobat in Oblivion
Heddy Honigmann’s films are so direct and so deftly understated that their artistry is almost invisible. Devoid of attention grabbing compositions and passionate rhetoric, her sublime, humanistic documentaries are modest but perfectly balanced, quiet but penetrating and immensely moving.
Honigmann is interested in big ideas like memory, justice, and art, but in her films they’re never abstractions. Her movies are stories about the people we pass by every day, people whose lives we never plumb because we don’t have the curiosity, the eye and the quiet fearlessness that allows Honigmann to find the poet and performer in the men, women and children who populate her work.
Oblivion, Honigmann’s latest, is her second film shot in Lima, Peru, where she was born the daughter of Holocaust survivors in 1951. Though she’s now based in the Netherlands and works internationally, Honigmann seems entirely at home on Lima’s teeming streets where acrobats perform at crosswalks and then beg for change amid the idling cars, musicians entertain, and vendors hawk everything from fancy dresses for Barbie dolls to tiny sewing kits. These choked avenues run through the film; lit up and alive, they are a public stage for the poor and the enterprising.
