What's Happening

September 5 to 6, 2008

Hi Mom! Film Festival

Carrboro & Chapel Hill, NC

Named after Brian De Palma's subversive black comedy from 1970, the Hi Mom! Film Festival was started in 1997 by a ragtag bunch of University of North Carolina students who thought that Chapel Hill needed a short film festival, and that they could deliver the fun experience that the community was waiting for. They kicked things off with a bang by awarding flaming trophies to category winners and, despite an exodus by the festival founders and a period when the fest was on hiatus, Hi Mom! continues to be an unashamedly enjoyable experience for both the filmmakers who trek to bring their films there and, of course, appreciative audiences. Rather than a straightforward short film festival – of which there are many – the programming team at Hi Mom! bring a pleasingly idiosyncratic flavor to their choices, collecting together films from all genres, styles and countries which have an offbeat sensibilities. (In this sense, it is a cousin of sorts to Minnesota's Bearded Child Film Festival, which we also featured recently in this space.) Programme highlights this year include Tony Gault's poignant experimental film Count Backwards From 5, Hope Dickson Leach's haunting and beautifully shot The Dawn Chorus and Bill Plympton's animated noir Shuteye Hotel, while Tokyo Breakfast (embedded here) is maybe one of the oddest choices in the line-up.

September 5 to 6, 2008

Selected Works By Nicolas Philibert

Los Angeles, CA

Frenchman Nicolas Philibert remains an essentially unknown name, despite the fact that he has been distinguishing himself as a documentarian since the late 1970s. He is most famous for his heartwarming 2002 film about an inspirational school teacher, To Be and To Have, which broke box office records for a documentary in France and achieved remarkable word-of-mouth success internationally. As a filmmaker, Philibert is visually very attuned to capturing the beauty of the everyday and of conveying stories in the stories in the purest, simplest way possible. In an interview a few years ago, he explained his aesthetic approach: "Cinema for me is both what you show and what you don't show; what you see and what you guess; what's in light and what's in shadow; what's in the foreground and what's in the background." The UCLA Film Archive's mini retrospective focuses on just a small portion of his work, but nicely bookends Philibert's career by screening I, Pierre Riviere, Having Slaughtered My Mother, My Sister And My Brother ..., Rene Alio's 1975 narrative reconstruction of a historical murder on which was Philibert the assistant director, alongside Philibert's most recent film, Return to Normandy (2007), in which he revisits the community where I, Pierre Riviere was filmed and gauges what changes have occurred in the interim. Also screening are two (very literal) museum pieces, Animals And More Animals and Louvre City, two films which examine the workings of Paris' Museum of Natural History and Louvre art museum respectively.

September 5 to 26, 2008

Iranian Film Today

Atlanta, GA

The quantity and quality of films that have come out of Iran over the past few decades is quite remarkable given the country's social and political problems, and the fact that Iranian filmmakers face extreme scrutiny and sometimes are unable to screen their work in their home country. (An example of such a situation is Bahman Motamedian's film about Iranian transsexuals, Khastegi (Tedium), which was announced as an entry at the Venice Film Festival only in the very last minute so as to make it possible to get the print of out Iran.) Iranian cinema has been distinguished by its poetic but unpretentious style and its unflinching engagement with the issues facing its country and, as a result, the Atlanta High Museum of Art's season Iranian Film Today features films which intelligently and delicately deal with the aftermath of an earthquake (Colors of Memory), the plight of disenfranchised women (Unfinished Stories), and the impact of war (Night Bus). While Iranian cinema may have a reputation for being somewhat dour, there are nevertheless comedies on show here such as Saman Salour's dry depiction of two isolated gas station employees, A Few Kilos of Dates for a Funeral, and Kamal Tabrizi's smart, humorous depiction of the battle of the sexes, Look for the Woman.

September 5 to 12, 2008

Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet

Cambridge, MA

Before Quentin Tarantino made waves with his stylish shoot 'em-ups or the practitioners of gore porn showed they had cinematic guts by pulling out the real ones of their characters, there was Sam Peckinpah. Peckinpah, who grew up in the very west he would later memorialize, broke into film through a chain of coincidences that landed him with Don Siegel, the B-movie master who would become Peckinpah's mentor. While he made a name for himself in the '60s for breathing life back into the western genre with his hard-hitting, gritty dramas, by the '70s Peckinpah was better known for his violence, his slow-motion, blood-spurting, bone-crunching violence. The Harvard Film Archive is remembering this iconoclastic American director with their 11-film series Sam Peckinpah, Blood Poet. Starting with examples of his very early television work on the 1958 TV series "The Rifleman," series continues to his 1977 war pic Cross of Iron. While many of the films are, of course, westerns (like Ride the High Country, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, or his seminal blood bath The Wild Bunch). But the series also includes his crime and war pics, and his most debated film, Straw Dogs about a peace-loving mathematician (Dustin Hoffman) who retreats to the Cornish countryside, only to find himself pulled into a storm of violence by his terrifying neighbors.

September 4 to 14, 2008

TBA On The Screen

Portland, OR

To the uninformed, the title of the Northwest FilmCenter new series might seem like they had no idea what to show, and thus it was TBA, To Be Announced. But in truth the FilmCenter's show is part of the much larger Time-Based Art Festival. Now in its sixth year, the festival's 11-day line up of experimental performance art and visual media is sort of aesthetic free for all. As the Festival Director Mark Russell starts off his hilariously off-the-cuff introduction, "This is a festival that takes its shirt off. This is a festival that features dance, theater, visual art, film, video and things that we cannot easily categorize. This is a festival about joy." While many of the events will be housed at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the FilmCenter is bringing to the screen the video/film portion. Among the films are artist Mike Kelley's Day Is Done (Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstructions #2-32), a 169-minute romp through the practices of pageantry and make-believe in everyday life, artist Ryan Trecartin's I-Be Area, an anarchical set of conversations among his splash-stick troupe, and finally Douglas Gordon's and Phillipe Pareno's Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait, a stunning study of the controversial soccer star.