Carleton’s International Film Forum presents films from all around the world in weekly screenings at the Weitz Center for Creativity Cinema. The Winter 2016 series runs from January 4th through February 29th. Screenings are free and open to the public. Visit the IFF website for trailers and more information.
Week #1 (M, 1/04) – The Girl in the White Coat (Darrell Wasyk, 2011, Canada, 113 min.) – Presented by Diane Nemec Ignashev
“Writer and director Darrell Wasyk’s film, The Girl in the White Coat, takes the classic tale The Overcoat by Nikolai Gogol and brings it into modern day Montreal. Pascale Montpetit plays Elise, a middle-aged woman struggling to survive with her minimum wage job. The apartment she lives in is barely heated, and she’s having difficulty keeping up with the payments for the retirement home that her father lives in. The only possession she owns is a white coat that was a gift from her father. When Elise decides to get her coat repaired it sets off a chain of events that will have a lasting effect on her life.” William Brownridge, Toronto Film Scene
Week #2 (W, 1/13) – Dust, Wind and Plague: A Conversation with Rini Yun Keagy on Ordinal (2015)
Ordinal (2016) is a work-in-progress film and collaboration between visiting professor Rini Yun Keagy and LA-based visual artist Miljohn Ruperto. Set in and around Bakersfield, California, the film is a multi-modal examination of valley fever, an incurable and airborne fungal disease common in the United States’ arid southern regions. Utilizing computer simulation technologies, animation and live action footage, Keagy and Ruperto implore ancient mythologies, horror aesthetics and contemporary theories of climate change in their exploration of biological and geophysical forces which conflate on the site of California’s Central Valley.
Keagy will speak about their process and progress on the project, and will screen and contextualize several scenes from the film. This presentation is co-sponsored by the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the Carleton Arts and Technologies Initiative.
Week #3 (M, 1/18) – The Dark Valley [Das finstere Tal] (Andreas Prochaska, 2014, Austria/Germany, 115 min.) – Presented by Juliane Schicker
“Visually ravishing Euro-western relocates classic cowboy myth-making to the snowy mountain slopes of 19th century Austria.” Stephen Dalton, The Hollywood Reporter
“A solitary stranger appears in a mountain village high in the Alps, stirring unease among the locals as he frigid winds of winter blow in. Subsequently taken in by the local patriarch, the mysterious newcomer becomes the subject of grim speculation after two of his host’s sons perish under mysterious circumstances.” Jason Buchanan, The New York Times
Week #4 (M, 1/25) – The Pearl Button [El botón de nácar] (Patricio Guzmán, 2015, Chile/France/Spain, 82 min.) – Presented by Cecilia Cornejo
“For decades, the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán has made nonfiction movies about his country’s troubled history, specifically the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and the murders and disappearances during Pinochet’s regime that continue to reverberate. The subject exerts something like a tidal pull on Mr. Guzmán, but in The Pearl Button he turns his lyrical, probing mind to the ocean that lines Chile’s seemingly endless coast and defines his homeland. […] A master of voice-over and metaphor (the title alone has an amazing payoff), he sifts through essential truths and draws links between Chile’s past and present inhabitants.” Nicholas Rapold, The New York Times
Week #5 (M, 2/01) – Utamaro and His Five Women [Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna] (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946, 106 min.) – Presented by Carol Donelan
“Set around 1800, the film tells the story of an artist—one of the greatest of all Japanese artists—who repudiated high-art traditions in favor of popular genres, which gave him leeway to depict characters, such as courtesans, who were disdained in the classical forms. There’s an element of autobiography in the film; there’s also a strong critique of the Japanese imperial values that were exalted in wartime propaganda. But there’s also another element of criticism that marked [director Kenji] Mizoguchi’s entire career, and it’s signalled in the title: the utterly subordinate and strictly governed condition of women in Japanese society. Fusing the movie’s personal element with its analytical one, Mizoguchi attempts to resolve the apparent conflict of filming according to his own stringent artistic sensibility while documenting an essentially political question that he found deeply troubling. The movie, one of Mizoguchi’s best, has the power of a manifesto and the urgency of a self-justification.” Richard Brody, The New Yorker
Week #6 (M, 2/08) – The Makioka Sisters [Sasame-yuki] (Kon Ichikawa, 1983, Japan, 130 min.) – Presented by Noboru Tomonari
“There’s certainly a strong tinge of [Yasujiro] Ozu in this stately tale, set in 1938 and structured around a series of marriage interviews in which an aristocratic Osaka family research a suitable prospect for the youngest but one of five sisters. The legacy of past scandal, the Makiokas’ diminishing status in increasingly industrialised Japan, the sniping for supremacy between the quintet of siblings, and the rumble of approaching conflict, all make for a complex narrative, micro-managed with authority by [Kon] Ichikawa, who … draws the viewer in through the elliptical release of significant personal detail. The film’s visual pleasures meanwhile (exquisite kimonos and cherry blossoms, elegant traditional interiors shimmering in low key lighting), are positively luxuriant, celebrating traditional Japanese aesthetics while recording the passing of a cossetted, gilded world.” Time Out, London
Week #7 (M, 2/15) – The Assassin [Nie yin niang] (Hou Hsiao Hsien, 2015, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong/France) – Presented by Shaohua Guo
“The Assassin is a stately action movie, graceful and slow-moving, with bursts of smoothly choreographed violence. Apart from those moments, the film unfolds almost like a series of exquisite paintings: landscapes and interiors composed with an exacting eye, every shape and color measured and placed according to a rigorous aesthetic.
The eye in question belongs to Hou Hsiao-Hsien, the Taiwanese filmmaker whose work, over more than 30 years, is a catalog of visual beauty and formal innovation. The Assassin, which won the prize for best director at Cannes in May, certainly exhibits both of those qualities. It is as gorgeous to behold as anything you are likely to encounter on a movie screen or a museum wall. And it’s a reminder that Mr. Hou, many of whose recent films have found mystery, sensuality and artistic possibility in modern cities, is also a master at imagining the past.
The Assassin takes place in ninth-century China, and concerns the consequences of a provincial rebellion against imperial authority. But the history being explored is less political than cinematic. Mr. Hou’s interest in the movie past is evident in frequent acts of homage … and here he joins a growing list of filmmakers embracing wuxia, the medieval sword-fighting genre that is in many ways a Chinese analog of the American western.” A.O. Scott, The New York Times
Week #8 (M, 2/22) – Extraordinary Stories [Historias extraordinarias] (Mariano Llinás, 2008, Argentina, 245 min.) – Presented by Jay Beck
“The film’s title is apt: [Extraordinary Stories is] something of a homemade megaproduction, a four-hour movie with 40 locations, 50 actors, dozens of stories, and original music (Llinás also composed the main song), made for peanuts (less than $50,000) and completely apart from local production habits. […] With its 18 chapters, three main stories and a handful of secondary ones, a voiceover covers almost every inch of the footage. The idea breaks the rules against redundancy that have been stressed in film courses since day one, but with a crucial catch. While the image overlaps with the text, it does not do so perfectly: in some cases the story anticipates the image and in others trails behind it, creating a sort of counterpoint between both techniques. […]
It’s a truly crazy film—not unflawed, but very touching in the end, because it states that film itself has become an endangered species, and that such a titanic work is needed to build something remarkable, although it itself is as thin and impermanent as a house of cards. In any case, [Extraordinary Stories] breathes freedom, and even if it’s only a sidestep in film history it’s well worth the detour. Maybe this arrogant, [Argentine] maverick has discovered some kind of clue to the future of film.” Quintín, Cinema Scope
Week #9 (M, 2/29) – Short Films by Sarah Christman (2008-2015) – Presented by Laska Jimsen & Rini Keagy and followed by a colloquium with the Director
Since 2006, Sarah J. Christman has made “a series of superbly crafted and thoughtful essay films on the zones where humankind manipulates nature in unexpected ways, affecting our memories, daydreams, personal histories, and perceptions of the world” (Adam Hyman, Los Angeles Filmforum). In films that defy easy categorization, Christman records both routine and remarkable events, revealing new worlds that have been hiding in plain sight.
Christman’s work has screened widely at festivals, museums, and mircocinemas such as the Museum of Modern Art, Rotterdam International Film Festival, European Media Art Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, and the Los Angeles Filmforum. She is an Associate Professor in the Film Department at Brooklyn College and her visit is co-sponsored by the Departments of Cinema and Media Studies, Environmental Studies, and Geology.