Gloria Steinem, often considered the face of feminism, attended a film by Saudi Arabian Haifaa al Mansour. Premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival this past weekend, Wadjda was celebrated at an afterparty at D.C. Moore Gallery in Chelsea. Amidst painted photographs by Duane Michals and paintings by Milton Avery, the filmmaker chatted with Queen Noor of Jordan and others, women decidedly international from the Middle East. Regal with her hair in a French twist, the queen wore a long skirt and jean jacket. Waiters passed hors d’oeuvres, including bite sized BLT’s, leading one to ponder, whose idea was it to serve bacon to Saudis?
Haifaa al Mansour said it was not easy for a woman to make films in her country, but this film had government support. When asked what traditions she was following, she said, “There are no traditions.”
On the eve of this year’s New Directors / New Films Festival, a collaboration between The Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Museum of Modern Art, the Titus I theater was abuzz with downtown indie elite: Sofia Coppola, Alex Karpovsky, Elizabeth Olsen, John Cameron Mitchell, Mark Birbiglia, Julia Garner, and photographer Bob Gruen. Gimme the Loot, Adam Leon’s film about two graffiti artists attempting to raise money by any means for the ultimate NYC art project, had its premiere. Featured in the 2012 ND/NF, Gimme the Loot was introduced with the kind of praise reserved for films by Almodovar, whose name was invoked in the introduction, films that will be discussed forever for moving the medium forward. In this film’s case, the language is fresh, that is, bold, bawdy, and brimming with life. The scammers, actors Tashiana Washington and Ty Hickson, and a rich girl played by Zoe Lescaze remain memorable.
Director Regis Roinsard was particularly excited when his film, Populaire, opened the annual Rendez-vous with French Cinema at the Paris Theater. He exulted introducing his stars Romain Duris and Deborah Francois. Evoking Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn movies, Populaire follows this festival’s first night traditions as a frothy comedy with old-fashioned sexist overtones, charming as only the French can make them! Populaire turns out to be a pink typewriter Francois’s character uses to win a ‘50’s era typing competition and land the man of her dreams played with fetching allure by Duris. What surprises, as Roinsard explained at the French Cultural Services afterparty, is that this was a first feature, based on a historic typing competition. Influenced by American movies, he wanted to make it into a love story. Of course, at the end, as the tap tap tap accelerates, the industrial types imagine the word machine’s future: the ball, with all the letters of the alphabet contained in a golfball-sized metal sphere, rotating as it makes its marks.
“This is a competition disguised as a film festival,” said First Time Film Festival co-founder Johanna Bennett, before introducing a panel featuring Harry Belafonte on Saturday morning at The Players Club. Twelve first films are screening and a winner will get distribution. Just when you thought the world had enough film festivals! But in addition to discovering new talent, the festival celebrates the old in a unique way. Successful filmmakers love their first films, and so, as a unique feature of this festival, Darren Aronofsky, Barbara Kopple, Philip Seymour Hoffman,Nancy Savoca,Hal Hartley,Christine Vachon,Melvin van Peeples, and Todd Solonz will show their debut work. On Friday night, Sofia Coppola screened The Virgin Suicides, with a Q&A that lasted twice the allotted time, illustrating that passion, First Fest co-founder Mandy Ward pointed out, surprised at how well this venture is going—after only one day. (The festival ends with an awards ceremony on Monday night at the Players Club, with Johanna Bennett’s father Tony, Ellen Burstyn, Martin Scorsese, and others.)
Back in 2007 when I first took on gossipcentral.com, I wrote about “Sundance Envy,” an oft misdiagnosed disease with one symptom: celluloid deprivation in January. Dr. Freud, are you listening? It is not that I yearn for icy ski conditions. This year Sundance seemed particularly alluring to me with two beat era films, movies of Kerouac’s Big Sur and of his 1945 collaboration with William S. Burroughs, And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, published in 2008, that became Kill Your Darlings. The latter boasted a big star: Daniel Radcliffe, and some indie favorites: Ben Foster and Elizabeth Olsen, two television stars Michael C. Hall and Jack Huston, and one newcomer, Dane DeHaan. Touted as a little-known scandal, for me, the story of the murder of Dave Kammerer (Hall) by Lucien Carr (DeHaan), the young would be poet he was stalking ever since they met in the boy scouts, years before, was a story I knew quite well from Jack Kerouac’s books, The Town & the City, Vanity of Duluoz, and a ton of secondary literature.
Even in the age of terrorism, the terror of the last century’s The Holocaust, has not lost its hold on the artistic imagination. As the victims of The Shoah are remembered at the United Nations and in synagogues worldwide, films continue to shed light on that darkest hour of the twentieth century. The Jewish Film Festival, an annual collaboration between the Film Society at Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum just ended with the New York premiere of Margarethe von Trotta’s biopic of Hannah Arendt, the writer/philosopher/educator, an émigré who covered the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for The New Yorker magazine, famously coining the phrase, “the banality of evil.”
Midway through a luncheon celebrating Rust and Bone, news came that the French film starring Marion Cotillard and Matthias Schoenaerts was nominated for an Independent Spirit Best International film award. Not even a glass was raised, as if awards for this edgy movie were simply a matter of course.
SONY Pictures Classics’ Michael Barker said he and his partner Tom Bernard backed Rust and Bone even before they read the script, making a deal with director Jacques Audiard after A Prophet’s critical success for his next film, whatever it might be. Then they get a script: A woman loses her legs, befriends a bouncer who also fights and has a son, eh, why not, Barker laughs, throwing up his arms. Like A Prophet with its insider prison view, the film offers a glimpse into a world unto itself: Picture the saturated, happy colors of resorts in travel brochures. Now imagine the opposite, beaches in dour tones in perpetual off-season. That is the look of Rust and Bone.
Jared Leto won the audience award at the annual IFP’s Gotham Awards at Cipriani Wall Street for his movie Artifacts; the film was mostly unknown to most at my table of industry insiders, but that sums up the theme of this, the ultimate alternative awards ceremony that even has a category, Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You. That award went to An Oversimplification of her Beauty, by the way. Meantime Leto, chatting at cocktails prior to receiving the award said he had just arrived from LA and left his bag on the plane. Seat of pants, he seemed to think the award should go to Beasts of the Southern Wild, the most edgy and mythic film of the year. Not to worry. Benh Zeitlin, the creator of that film took away many of the evening’s honors, including the Best Breakthrough Director and newly minted Bingham Ray award, after the pioneering champion of independent films who died suddenly in Park City this past January.
On April 19, 1989, you could not miss the headlines—and the horror of the Central Park jogger case. A white woman in a tracksuit, pummeled, raped, unconscious. Who did this? Packs of wild black boys aprowl in the park. Case closed.
The Central Park Five, the final non-fiction feature in the DOC NYC Fest last week, a deft examination of the most publicized rape case in NY history, questions the handling of this case: the arrest and conviction of 5 black teens seemed to put the unsettling crime at rest. Now, so many years later, the 5 young men attempt to put their lives together after a 2002 exoneration that got little press attention. No one so much as said sorry.
The winner of audience awards in Toronto, the Hamptons, and other film festivals, David O. Russell’s new movie, Silver Linings Playbook is not only a crowd pleaser, it has the gravitas to make it to the top awards. This movie is to Philadelphia, The Eagles and football what Lowell, Massachusetts and the ring was to The Fighter: all you need is (heart).
