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Film Festivals

New Directors/New Films 2006





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Tickets to New Directors/New Films go on sale to the public on March 3 and are available for purchase for screenings at both venues (Walter Reade Theatre and the Titus Theater) at Alice Tully Hall, the Walter Reade Theater, online at www.filmlinc.com (there is a $1.25 service charge per ticket), and by phone by calling CENTERCHARGE at (212) 721-6500 (there is a $5.50 handling charge per ticket). Tickets for MoMA screenings are also available at MoMA’s Film and Media desk. Ticket prices are $12 for the general public, $10 for Film Society and MoMA members. Series tickets (10 or more different films) are $10 for the general public and $8 for members. Series tickets will only be sold by mail order through the Alice Tully box office. The HBO Films Roundtable tickets are $10 for the general public and $6 for Film Society and MoMA members.

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Please note: all film descriptions were written by the festival’s programmers. The first letter of the program number indicates the venue: W – Walter Reade Theater, M – MoMA.

HALF NELSON
Ryan Fleck, USA, 2006; 106 min. - A THINKFilm release.
M-22a: Wed., Mar. 22: 6:00 P.M.; W-23b: Thur., Mar. 23: 8:45 P.M.; W-25b: Sat., Mar. 25: 3:45 P.M.

A committed and popular teacher and coach at a public New York City junior high school, Dan’s totally engaged at school but his private life is a mess, as he spends most of his time off in a drug haze. He manages to keep his two lives separate until Drey, one of his students, discovers him in a compromising situation. Now the two embark on a turbulent journey through the chaos and temptations of their worlds. Director Ryan Fleck has fleshed out the characters from his short film Gowanus, Brooklyn (ND/NF 2004) and created a full-bodied drama that explores personal demons and the friendships that can help us change our lives. Ryan Gosling plays Dan with an idealistic intensity and Shareeka Epps—who originated the role of Drey in the short—packs an emotional wallop as a teenager who struggles to make sense of her world.


THE BLOSSOMING OF MAXIMO OLIVEROS
Auraeus Solito, Philippines, 2006; 100 min.
M-22b: Wed., Mar. 22: 9 P.M.; W-23a: Thur., Mar. 23: 6:00 P.M.; W-25a: Sat., Mar. 25: 1:00 P.M.

A remarkable feature film debut, Maximo Oliveros is the irresistibly endearing tale of a twelve-year-old Filipino boy named Maxi who lives with his outlaw father and thuggish older brothers in the teeming slums that ring Manila. A neighborhood favorite despite his flirty walk and elaborate hair accessories, Maxi cooks, sews, shops, and brings a note of welcome warmth to the motherless, all-male household. One night Victor, a kind rookie cop, saves Maxi from a beating, and a very special friendship blooms. Smitten with the handsome law enforcer, Maxi is torn between his loyalty to his brutal yet loving family and his attraction to the young cop. Infused with warmth, humor, and wisdom, the film is a layered portrait of a different kind of community. Nathan Lopez as Maxi and JR Valentin as Victor make an unforgettable odd couple.


OCTOBER 17, 1961
Alain Tasma, France, 2005; 106 min.
M-23a: Thur., Mar. 23: 6:00 P.M.; W-24b: Fri., Mar. 24: 8:45 P.M.

Over four decades later, the shadows of French colonialism in Algeria continue to haunt not only French historical memory but its recent cinema as well. Director Alain Tasma, a former assistant to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Barbet Schroeder, making his feature film debut, meticulously re-creates a pivotal moment in the Algerian struggle that has surprisingly remained practically unknown by the French public until recently. As the fighting in Algeria was winding down, Algerians living in France became the targets of violence, while the Algerians and their supporters responded by killing policemen. The FLN—the main Algerian political group—called for a peaceful demonstration, and thousands of Algerians took to the Paris streets, setting the stage for a tragic confrontation. Tasma gives voice to both the Algerians and the French authorities, carefully detailing the factions, the internal divisions, and the eventual cover-up of a night whose resonance can still be felt in France and beyond.


LOOK BOTH WAYS
Sarah Watt, Australia, 2005; 100 min. A Kino International release.
M-23b: Thur., Mar. 23: 8:45 P.M.; W-26c: Sun., Mar. 26: 5:30 P.M.

Sarah Watt, an Australian writer, director, and producer of prize-winning animations, brings her particular offbeat sensibility to her feature film debut, an unconventional and complex story of intersecting lives. For anxiety-ridden and disaster-prone Meryl (Justine Clarke), life is daunting. Her vivid imagination invokes scary events that we see as hand-drawn animation imagery. Still numb after her father’s funeral, Meryl witnesses a real accident, an event that links her fate to other troubled souls, particularly Nick (William McInnis), a reporter dealing with a health crisis, and Andy (Anthony Hayes), a divorced father coping with his girlfriend’s unwanted pregnancy. Slightly bizarre and intense yet inexplicably buoyant, this astute examination of personal mortality in contemporary times may signal a new New Wave in Australian cinema.

Preceded by
Pia
Javier Andrade, Ecuador, 2005; 9 min.
A story of a young girl dealing with two rites of passage as she turns fifteen—one celebratory, the other life-changing.


ICEBERG
Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy, Belgium, 2005; 84 min.
W-24a: Fri., Mar. 24: 6:00 P.M.; M-25a: Sat., Mar. 25: 3:00 P.M.

Not since René Clair and Jacques Tati have gags been so expertly constructed or characters looked more mournful than in Iceberg, a tasty concoction with equal measures of poetic fantasy and slapstick comedy. In a tranquil seaside town in lower Normandy, life goes through its predictable paces. Fiona, our sad-sack heroine, lives with her husband and kids and manages a local restaurant. One day, as she is closing up, she accidentally gets locked in a cold storage chamber from which she emerges a woman transformed—and violently obsessed with all things frozen. Before long, she meets a deaf sailor, embarks on a new adventure aboard a skiff named “Le Titanique,” and then…. The three venturesome filmmakers—Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy—are true cinematic magicians and gifted clowns as well.

Preceded by
Terra Incognita
Peter Volkart, Switzerland, 2005; 18 min.
This hilarious “mockumentary” explores one young physicist’s bizarre experiments and secret expeditions to unknown parts of the world.


QUINCEAÑERA
Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, USA, 2006; 90 min.
M-24a: Fri., Mar. 24: 6:00 P.M.; W-25d: Sat., Mar. 25: 9:00 P.M.

This double-prize-winner from the 2006 Sundance Film Festival is a spirited and well-wrought contemporary comedy/drama—one that entertains as it performs a reality check on a close-knit community. Magdalena is obsessed with preparations for her all-important fifteenth birthday celebration in Echo Park, one of Los Angeles’s traditional Mexican neighborhoods, until she finds she’s pregnant and her father sends her packing. She lands at the home of her uncle, who’s also taken in her cousin who has been thrown out of his house. Meanwhile, gentrification is disturbing the status quo in the old neighborhood, and crucial events tear at the fabric of traditional family life. Quinceañera is an unsentimental and genuinely unpretentious tale of growing up and taking charge of one’s future in a rapidly changing reality.


CAVITE
Ian Gamazon and Neill dela Llana. Philippines/USA, 2005; 80 min. – A Truly Indie Release.
M-24b: Fri., Mar. 24: 8:30 P.M.; W-26b: Sun., Mar. 26: 3:00 P.M.

In the city of Cavite, Philippines, people will do just about anything to survive. This is a bitter discovery for Adam, a young Filipino-American called back to his native country for his father’s funeral. But on arrival at the airport the purpose of his visit is dramatically altered by an anonymous phone call that will change the course of his life. He’s told that his mother and sister are in the clutches of a terrorist group and will be murdered unless he cooperates. This first-person verité nightmare is an edge-of-the-seat thriller, with Adam and his terrorist caller engaged in a battle of will and wits against the backdrop of a country rarely represented in such rich detail. Cavite is bare-bones filmmaking at its finest and a tribute to cinematic inventiveness.

Preceded by
Detail
Kanwal Sethi, Germany, 2005; 7 min.
Every day, in the town of Bet Omar in the West Bank, residents must negotiate a most unusual checkpoint.


SANGRE
Amat Escalante, Mexico/France, 2005; 90 min.
M-25b: Sat., Mar. 25: 5:45 P.M.; W-26d: Sun., Mar. 26: 8:15 P.M.

Diego and Blanca live out a mundane existence. Their jobs are menial and life at home consists of eating, watching television, or having sex in various parts of the house. While the sex is plentiful (Diego may come home and find Blanca naked on the floor, waiting for him), it seems to hold the same allure for him as watching TV. When Diego’s grown daughter from a previous marriage shows up in need of his help, Blanca’s jealous streak erupts. Suddenly, Diego can go nowhere and do nothing without her suspicion being aroused. A minimalist first feature that explores an arid relationship and its consequences, Sangre’s low-key approach builds to a horrific climax that takes us by surprise. Actors Cirilo Recio and Laura Saldaña, as the couple that can only communicate through their flesh, take us to the limits of a ritualized passion.

Preceded by

The Last Farm

Runar Runarsson. 2005, Iceland; 13 min.
A perfectly constructed tale of the last day on the last farm in an isolated part of Iceland.


MAN PUSH CART
Ramin Bahrani, USA, 2005; 87 min. - A Films Philos release.
W-25c: Sat., Mar. 25: 6:30 P.M.; M-26a: Sun., Mar. 26: 3:30 P.M.

In the indigo of a Manhattan dawn, Ahmad wheels, pushes, and coaxes a vending cart across town to Madison Avenue, where he sells coffee and donuts. He has his customers, some regular, some not, but he is alone; his life is one of solitary work on a particularly social corner of New York City. One day he meets a successful and outgoing businessman from Pakistan, who, much to Ahmad’s discomfort, recognizes him as a former pop star back home. Written and directed by North Carolinian Ramin Bahrani, who made his first film Strangers (2000) in Iran, and starring first-time actor Ahmad Razvi as a man fleeing his past among the urban multitudes, Man Push Cart captures the siren beauty of midtown Manhattan and the multicultural, multiethnic complexity of life in a city that suddenly reneges on its comforting promise of anonymity.


A SOAP
Pernille Fischer Christensen, Denmark, 2006; 104 min.
M-25c: Sat., Mar. 25: 8:30 P.M.; W-27a: Mon., Mar. 27: 6 P.M.

This unconventional love story about two neighbors’ offbeat search for love and lust—and their panic when they find both—is also a serious look at the nature of contemporary relationships and gender roles. Using the enticing conventions of soap opera, newcomer Fischer Christensen deftly directs Kim Fupz Aakeson’s script as a new kind of romance. Ill-tempered Charlotte has just split from her husband and finds herself living above the promiscuous Ulrik (a.k.a. Veronica) who awaits a sex-change operation—and has his own family problems to contend with. All the while a friendly narrator keeps us updated on the latest wrinkles in our characters’ lives and their quest for a happy ending. The raw physicality of Trine Dyrholm’s fearless performance as Charlotte is beautifully contrasted with David Dencik’s reserved yet determined Ulrik/Veronica.


ELEVEN MEN OUT
Róbert I. Douglas, Iceland/Finland/United Kingdom, 2005; 90 min.
M-26b: Sun., Mar. 26: 6:00 P.M.; W-29b: Wed., Mar. 29: 8:30 P.M.

Óttar Thor is a champion soccer star, handsome and arrogant, who after winning a game casually tells a journalist he’s gay. Imagine the surprise to his wife, a former Miss Iceland, his teenage son, already sullen and troubled, and his father, Thor’s macho coach. A breezy and feisty dramatic comedy directed by Róbert I. Douglas, this is a story about a man who, much to the chagrin of his family, exchanges one sort of domesticity for another. After choosing a same-sex partner, he is kicked off the championship team where players are presumably straight. But once a player, always a player, and Óttar is offered a spot on a team in a basement soccer league that gay sportsmen from all over Iceland soon insist on joining. The ensemble cast is pitch perfect, as is the tone in this lively account of the surprising accommodations people are capable of making.


JOHN & JANE TOLL-FREE
Ashim Ahluwalia, India, 2005; 86 min. - An HBO Documentary Films presentation.
M27a: Mon., Mar. 27: 6:00 P.M.; W-30b: Thur., Mar. 30: 8:45 P.M.

A vast fluorescent-lit room in an anonymous compound in India–welcome to the world of overseas call centers. Indian by day, American by night–so they can accommodate U.S. business hours–the young men and women profiled here struggle to have their share of the American Dream as they sell products and troubleshoot for consumers. These 1-800 workers learn to identify completely with their American aliases–meet Glen, Sydney, and Naomi–and to reject their traditional values (until they return to their Indian homes and to mothers urging them to eat). Ahluwalia’s revealing documentary plays like science fiction and shows a consequence of globalization to be the outsourcing of souls as well as of goods. Cultural imperialism has never looked scarier or more complete in this ferocious, funny, and ingeniously constructed film.


OLD JOY
Kelly Reichardt, USA, 2006; 76 min.
W-27b: Mon., Mar. 27: 8:45 P.M.; M-29a: Wed., Mar. 29: 6:00 P.M.

Can an old friendship rekindle its spark? Kelly Reichardt’s luminous new film explores this theme with subtlety and insight. Mark (Will Oldham) and Kurt (Daniel London), whose lives have gone in different directions, reunite for one carefree weekend camping trip to the Oregon mountains. Kurt is still a free spirit, seemingly unattached. Mark has a partner and a baby on the way. But these pals are in a ruminative mood, trying to get hold of a common memory. As the terrain changes from urban to wilderness, so do they, registering a range of emotions that define and redefine their relationship. Reichardt’s second film after her well-received River of Grass (1994) is a Whitmanesque exploration of nature, both human and elemental, and the idea that old joy can have new connotations. The musical score by Yo La Tengo is just right for the structure and mood of this affecting study of male bonding.

Preceded by
The Wraith Of Cobble Hill
Adam Parrish King, USA, 2005; 15 min.
Young Felix gets an object lesson in responsibility as he grows up fast in this lovely animated fable.


IN BED
Matías Bize, Chile/Germany, 2005; 85 min.
M-27b: Mon., Mar. 27: 8:30 P.M.; W-28b: Tue., Mar. 28: 8:30 P.M.

A man and a woman meet and immediately fall into bed. They are intimate strangers, so unknown to each other that they introduce themselves only after they’ve made love. Thus begins an emotional pas de deux that takes place over the course of an entire night. As they get to know one another, they tell truths and lies, explore loyalty and betrayal, come together and withdraw, all within the confines of a seedy motel room. Matías Bize directs this close encounter as an erotic chamber piece, and also a study in voyeurism–just try looking away. His choice of a cold setting for steamy romance affirms the complex nature of mutual attraction. As brand new lovers who test the boundaries of trust, actors Blanca Lewin and Gonzalo Valenzuela bare their souls and their bodies in two masterfully uninhibited performances. They spend their time literally and figuratively naked, leaving us nowhere to go but into their deepest desires and fears.


IRON ISLAND
Mohammad Rasoulof, Iran, 2005; 90 min. - A Kino International release.
W-28a: Tue., Mar. 28: 6:00 P.M.; M-30b: Thur., Mar. 30: 9:30 P.M.

In a deserted stretch of ocean sits an enormous, rusting oil tanker, an “iron island” on which dozens of families, some with their livestock, have taken up residence. The ship is their home, their school, their mosque; some of the youngest residents have never lived anywhere else. Presiding over this behemoth is the enigmatic Captain Nemat (well played by veteran actor Ali Nasirian), a stern but kindly, paternalist yet absolute ruler who doesn’t hesitate to resort to cruelty if it suits his purposes. Supplies are bought by selling off the barrels of oil still stored in the ship’s hull, or stripping parts of the ship itself for scrap. Yet despite Nemat’s best efforts and hard work, there’s no negating a simple fact: the ship is sinking, and some kind of plan has to be devised to move somewhere. Writer/director Mohammad Rasoulof’s immensely suggestive tale is at its heart a tale of survival, a look at a group of people learning to live in even the most unlikely of circumstances—and refusing to give up.


PAVEE LACKEEN
Perry Ogden, Ireland, 2005; 87 min.
W-29a: Wed., Mar. 29: 6:00 P.M.; M-31b: Fri., Mar. 31: 8:30 P.M.

Every country has its own itinerant population, those who live in a society, but are not really of it. Photographer Perry Ogden’s feature film debut is a moving portrayal of the “Travellers” of Ireland. This is neither a documentary nor a fictional film, but a hybrid that brilliantly plays with the fine line that exists between the two; the work has, simply put, a core truthfulness to it. Using nonprofessional actors from the Irish Traveller community, Ogden explores their lives through the eyes of ten-year-old Winnie, who lives with her family on the industrialized outskirts of Dublin. Their home is a ramshackle trailer, and Winnie’s mother spends much of her time jockeying between the possibility of buying a better mobile home or moving into a house that social services is trying to foist on her. Winnie has her own troubles at school and has to deal with a bureaucracy that doesn’t know how to deal with her. Ogden collaborated with his cast to create the characters and the narrative that give cinematic life to the Travellers’ own stories.


FIRST ON THE MOON
Alexey Fedorchenko, Russia, 2005; 75 min.
M-29b: Wed., Mar. 29: 8:45 P.M.; W-1a: Sat., Apr. 1: 1:30 P.M.

Think it was Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin? Well, think again, because as Alexey Fedorchenko’s unsettling new film reveals, a Soviet cosmopilot, Ivan Kharlamov, actually went there and back in 1938, piloting his experimental (and highly secretive) craft back to Chile, from where he undertook an arduous journey across the Pacific, through China and Mongolia and finally into Mother Russia itself. Due to the sensitive nature of his mission, Kharlamov disguised his true identity under a series of aliases, including Prince Alexander Nevsky—the hero of a then-popular Soviet film—while his exploits were being filmed by the NKVD (Communist Secret Police). Beyond being a kind of record of a sort of historical event, Fedorchenko’s film is a touching expression of an unfettered utopian spirit—a sense of the limitless possibilities of human ingenuity and imagination—that characterized many people’s vision of the Soviet experiment before its grim realities settled in.

Preceded by
Still World
Elbert van Strien, The Netherlands, 2005; 30 min.
Sometimes stopping the world doesn’t make it any more manageable.


TEXAS
Fausto Paravidino, Italy, 2005; 104 min.
W-30a: Thur., Mar. 30: 6:00 P.M.; M-2a: Sun., Apr. 2: 1:00 P.M.

The hills of Piemonte aren’t precisely the rolling plains of the Lone Star state, yet the twenty-somethings who populate Fausto Paravidino’s impressive debut feature would feel right at home in The Last Picture Show. Underemployed, looking for a new thrill or just a way to get out, they gather on Saturdays, flirting, drinking and occasionally threatening each other, but mainly getting whatever solace they can from feeling they’re not alone. Yet cracks in the group are starting to emerge, especially when the handsome slacker Gianluca begins cheating on his longtime girlfriend Cinzia with a married schoolteacher, Maria (Valeria Golino, in a heartfelt performance). Assembling a cast of some of the most talented young actors in Italian cinema today, Paravidino—who also appears in the film—creates in Texas a revealing portrait of a generation’s troubled passage to an adulthood that seems to offer only limited horizons.


INTO GREAT SILENCE
Philip Gröning, Germany, 2005; 162 min.
M-30a: Thur., Mar. 30: 6:00 P.M.; W-2a: Sun., Apr. 2: 12:00 noon

As a novice filmmaker, Philip Gröning asked the Carthusian monks of the Grand Chartreuse, a monastery in the French Alps, for permission to make a documentary about them. They said they would get back to him. They telephoned Gröning sixteen years and three dramatic features later. Gröning was invited, without crew or artificial lighting, to record their daily lives, prayers, rituals, and rare outdoor excursions. Into Great Silence is a delicate chronicle, impressionistic, meditative, and beautiful, of a year in and around the monastery, where gardening, cooking, barbering, tailoring, and other monastic activities reveal the monks’ silent communion with God. A tranquil contemplation about the possibility of transcendence for all.


TWELVE AND HOLDING
Michael Cuesta, 2005, USA; 90 min. - An IFC Films release.
W-31a: Fri., Mar. 31: 6:00 P.M.; M-1c: Sat., Apr. 1: 8:15 P.M.; W-2b: Sun., Apr 2: 3:45 P.M.

Michael Cuesta (L.I.E., ND/NF 2001) offers a powerful look into an adolescent world in which his characters’ still-growing bodies disguise the complexity of the emotional lives raging within them. Jacob and Rudy Carges are 12-year-old twin brothers (both played by Conor Donovan, an exceptional young actor) who couldn’t be more different—Rudy is athletic and outgoing, while Jacob hides behind a hockey mask. Malee, daughter of a detached psychotherapist mother, develops a heart-breaking emotional attachment to one of her mother’s patients. And overweight Leonard decides it’s time for his equally overweight mother to start slimming—by any means necessary. Avoiding sensationalism or grand guignol theatrics, Cuesta never lets us lose sight of the youth of his subjects—in the end they’re just kids trying to make their way in the world while discovering their ability to affect that world and the lives of those around them.


13 TZAMETI
Gela Babluani, France, 2005; 93 min.
M-31a: Fri., Mar. 31: 6:00 P.M.; W-1b: Sat., Apr. 1: 4:15 P.M.; W-2d: Sun., Apr. 2: 8:45 P.M.

An extraordinarily assured debut feature, 13 Tzameti was warmly received at both Venice and Sundance, where it won the top prize in the International Dramatic Competition. Owed money, and lacking any real sense of direction in life, Sébastien (Georges Babluani, brother of director Gela) decides to take the place of a dead man on a mysterious mission. Sébastien doesn’t know what the man did, but he does know that it was awfully lucrative. Thus begins Sébastien’s journey towards a contemporary vision of hell, a world in which anything, even one’s life, is simply another commodity to be bought, sold, or wagered on. With several extraordinary scenes definitely not for the faint-hearted, 13 Tzameti is less shocking for what it shows than for its portrait of a bleak, completely amoral world. The son of a major Georgian director, Gela Babluani, is a talent to watch.


THINGS THAT HANG FROM TREES
Ido Mizrahy, USA, 2006; 98 min.
W-31b: Fri., Mar. 31: 8:30 P.M.; M-1b: Sat., Apr. 1: 5:30 P.M.

Twenty-four-year-old Ido Mizrahy’s haunting debut film, based on Aaron Louis Tordini’s novella, is set in 1969 in America’s oldest city, St. Augustine, Florida, in a neighborhood that has seen better days. But since this insular community is imaginatively situated in Southern Gothic territory somewhere between hope and desire, those days could be anywhere a live oak tree sends out its branches to engulf or devour. Tommy (the extraordinary Cooper Musgrove) is an unusual boy, somewhat inured to misfortune, whose family is downright peculiar. His dreamy mother, marvelously played by Deborah Kara Unger, tries to care for her son but is often seen sitting as a mannequin in her own store window; Tom Sr. (Ray McKinnon), the absent father, is a wild cowboy who could have been invented by Sam Shepard. The townspeople are a bunch of oddballs and bullies, and Tommy has to navigate the terrain in his own ingenious way.


MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY
Laura Poitras, USA, 2005; 90 min.
M-1a: Sat., Apr. 1: 3:00 P.M.; W-2c: Sun., Apr. 2: 6:15 P.M.

Working alone in Iraq over eight months, filmmaker Laura Poitras created an extraordinarily intimate portrait of Iraqis living under U.S. occupation. Her principal focus is Dr. Riyadh, an Iraqi medical doctor, father of six, and Sunni political candidate. An outspoken critic of the occupation, Riyadh is equally passionate about the need to establish democracy in Iraq; despite the misgivings of members of his family and his community, he argues that Sunni participation in the elections is essential. Yet all around him, Dr. Riyadh sees only chaos, as his waiting room fills each day with ordinary Iraqis showing the physical and mental effects of the ever-increasing violence. The remarkable access that Poitras was able to gain into the Sunni community is matched by her great skill as a filmmaker; never forcing an issue nor making cheap political points, Poitras carefully assembles the images and sounds collected during her stay into a powerful mosaic of daily life in Iraq that the mainstream media never come close to capturing.


WILD TIGERS I HAVE KNOWN
Cam Archer, USA, 2006; 93 min.
W-1c: Sat., Apr. 1: 6:45 P.M.; M-2b: Sun., Apr. 2: 3:45 P.M.

Archer’s explosive debut feature (executive produced by Gus Van Sant and Scott Rudin) may be the millennium’s first example of a neo-American Underground film, ferocious, passionate, somewhat taboo in its subject, and likely to divide contemporary audiences. A young boy and a loner, Logan develops a crush on an older one, Rodeo, but must compete with the attention Rodeo gives his girlfriend. After school Logan spends time in suggestive phone conversations phone, taking walks in the forest (where mountain lions roam) and hanging out with his only friend who, like him, knows that he’s different. Made with a ragged inventiveness on a miniscule budget, Wild Tigers is a fearless and original portrait of adolescent foolishness and ache.


TOI ET MOI
Julie Lopes-Curval, France, 2005; 94 min.
W-1d: Sat., Apr. 1: 9:15 P.M.; M-2c: Sun., Apr. 2: 6:15 P.M.

Ah, the complications of romance! Sisters Ariane and Lena both have beaus, but new men are piquing their interest. Lena’s in love with François, but has now met Mark, who tries his best to sweep her off her feet. Ariane’s been dating Farid for two years, but he won’t commit, and she finds the charms of a Spanish construction worker hard to resist. All these predicaments mirror the dilemmas of the characters in the “photo-novels” that Ariane creates for a popular magazine. While Lena is serious and confused, Ariane is the loopy one, walking into doors and playing out her desires, as well as her sister’s, in her writing. Director Julie Lopes-Curval creates a delightful narrative of close encounters and near misses in a charming romance with a playful style that perfectly suits the photo-novel genre. Winning performances by Marion Cotillard and Julie Depardieu, as the siblings yearning for just the right match, grace this witty film in which fantasy and reality commingle.

Preceded by
Phantom Canyon
Stacey Steers, USA, 2006; 10 min.
Meticulous handmade collages explore a woman’s fantastical journey through memories.



HBO Films Roundtable

“From Script to Screen: A Live Discussion”
Sun., Mar. 26: 12:30 P.M. at the Walter Reade Theater

Getting a film made is an achievement and a unique experience for each filmmaker. Talent, perseverance, and luck play a part. But each individual emerging artist meets the challenges in a different way. This group of promising newcomers has agreed to share their road maps from original idea to New York premiere at New Directors/New Films and destinations beyond. New Directors/New Films, now in its 35th year, has always been interested in discovering and supporting new talent from around the world and this is a banner year in this regard. Join us for this panel featuring directors—including Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (Half Nelson), Ramin Bahrani (Man Push Cart) and Sarah Wattas (Look Both Ways)—who tell their stories and answer your questions.


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