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Contents

This Film Is Not Yet Rated: An Interview With Kirby Dick JUST ADDED 9-17
Audience Q&A With Kirby Dick JUST ADDED 9-17
Kicking His Way to Stardom: Tony Jaa
Hollywoodland: Q&A With Director Allen Coulter
Drinking Games: An Interview with Beerfest's Erik Stolhanske and Steve Lemme
Seen in Edinburgh: Driving Lessons
The Munich International Film Festival
Young Film Critics Invited to Berlin
We Need to Hear From You
Calendar of Events

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By Leslie Weisman, DC Film Society Member

This year's Filmfest München (Munich Filmfest) was, as always, the sublimest of summer sites for close encounters with legendary filmmakers and the best in international cinema. (This Andreas Ströhl frankly and disarmingly told us at the opening press conference, Munich is not an "A" festival like Berlin or Cannes. Practically speaking, what does that mean? "We focus not on stars, but on good films." In other words, a cinephile's paradise!

This year, in addition to its customary screening of 200+ films from more than forty countries, many of them world premieres, and "podium discussions" with dozens of notable directors, Filmfest München focused its telephoto lens on three of today's filmic giants. One of these has extended his legacy so that it now encompasses a family of five, whose exile from their homeland has not kept them from making incisive, award-winning films about it--or from hoping one day to return to it.

But perhaps, we should take our singular cineastes in geographical order...

Kudos to a hometown fella: Barry Levinson
Filmfest München's prestigious CineMerit Award, bestowed each year upon "an outstanding personality in the international film community for extraordinary contributions to motion pictures as an art form" (previous recipients include Geraldine Chaplin, Milos Forman and Jacqueline Bisset) this year honored our own Barry Levinson, auteur of such classic films as Diner, Rain Man, Wag the Dog and Good Morning, Vietnam. In a relaxed but illuminating conversation with Filmfest programmer Robert Fischer, Levinson held forth about the extent to which his films are personal ("Obviously they express a lot of the feelings I have, but I've always tried to make myself as anonymous as possible, so that you're not aware of how it got done, you're not aware of the shots") and the secret behind his productiveness ("I write extremely quickly; it feels like I'm doing dictation").

How does he develop his story lines and characters? "If I can launch the characters with certain ideas, they will take over the piece, to take me where it needs to go. The story begins to tell itself, the characters will surprise me, take me to places I don't expect. If I tried to do an outline, I'd still be working on Diner!" Which of his characters are closest to him? "They're all a part of me; I'm actually like some of the women in my films, like the one who works in a television station, because I worked in a television station. But--Sixty-Six [his 2003 novel, written as the basis for a possible film in the Diner series] is probably the closest I'll ever come to me." While Diner, Avalon, Tin Man and Liberty Heights may closely reflect his Weltanschauung, "it's not intentional--I try to be as invisible as possible."

Mention of the book enabled an easy segue into Levinson's career as a scriptwriter, where he cut his teeth under Mel Brooks' tutelage before becoming a director. "It was the best apprenticeship you could have. I worked with him for three years on two movies, Silent Movie [where the only spoken word is uttered by mime Marcel Marceau, who says "Non!"] and High Anxiety. We would meet every morning for breakfast, work on the script, shoot some scenes... Even though we have different approaches, I learned so much from him."

What made him decide to become a director? "I never had an ambition of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go. My number-one ambition as a boy was not to work in my father's store." Levinson regaled the audience with the tale of how he got into filmmaking "by accident." It seems that a friend of his named George was taking acting classes, and needed a ride. Levinson agreed to give him a lift, and when George got out of the car, he insisted that Levinson accompany him so he wouldn't be sitting outside by himself. Not having any interest in acting, but finding no way to agreeably decline, Levinson went in--and was immediately issued an ultimatum by the instructor: If you want to stay here, you'll have to participate.

It didn't take long before Levinson was hooked. And his buddy? George Jung soon dropped out, and their paths diverged. Years later, watching the film Blow, Levinson learned what became of his friend. Seems that in the intervening years, while Barry Levinson was honing his writing and directing skills, George Jung was honing other skills, and had achieved a fame of his own: as the biggest cocaine dealer in North America. (He wound up in prison.)

But back to Barry. First, of course, came Diner, which was not the immediate hit one might expect. Daily Variety called it "dark and depressing," said Levinson, which puzzled him. But then Pauline Kael gave it a great review, and it took off. "If you're not working within a specific genre," he added, "sometimes critics don't know what to do [with a film], how to handle it." The diner in Diner, we learned, was transported from New Jersey to Baltimore, then returned to NJ, then back to Baltimore, which at last bought it and settled it there--and turned it into a voc-ed school.

The style of Diner, where a lot of the dialogue seems to be improvised, was picked up again later in television, noted Fischer, on shows like Homicide. Levinson agreed: "It's like life, where a lot of times you don't say exactly what you mean, where you hesitate, and that's what I wanted to get into the characters. The inarticulate nature of what we say may have great significance, but it gets hidden in the messiness of it all, as opposed to saying specifically what we want, which we don't generally do." Where did this come from? "As an 11-year old, I was struck by the exchange in Paddy Chayevsky's Marty which I saw on TV, where two guys are talking: 'Whaddya wanna do, Marty?' 'I don' know, whadda you wanna do?'--so natural, so normal, so everyday. So I determined to write dialogue like that. And Diner is all that kind of dialogue." "And then you picked that up for Homicide. It changed the language of TV." "Well, it's dialogue-driven, which kind of drives the producers crazy, because they want to have an action- driven promo to advertise it. I wanted to explore how working in a job like that day in and day out affects people, changes people."

For Rain Man, Levinson decided to strip it down to the bare essentials: two brothers in a car, and the character development that takes place as they travel together. Rain Man helped bring autism out into the open, he told us, helped people to recognize, identify and treat it, and not be ashamed of it. Dustin Hoffman asked Levinson how he wanted him to do the pitching motion that was one of the physical aspects of Raymond's autism. Levinson told him to think of pitching a ball, to get into the rhythm of it. But that was only the physical part, not the conceptual part, and Hoffman needed more. So Levinson came up with the idea of the old Abbott and Costello routine, and told Hoffman to "think of it as a mantra" that he would repeat along with the arm motion. It clicked. Levinson later spoke with psychologists, who said an autistic person might indeed repeat a phrase like this as a sort of mantra.

What does the future hold for Barry Levinson? His latest film, Man of the Year, about a Jon Stewart-like talk-show host who runs for the presidency, is opening in October, and features Robin Williams, Laura Linney, and Christopher Walken. And watch for a triple-DVD set of Bugsy. (Ignore any hype about a "Brilliant" film with Scarlett Johansson; the blurb was premature. The film fell through.) What does he see for the future of cinema? "It's so much easier to make and distribute films now. I think we're at the beginning of a big revolutionary change; you're no longer bound by the old conventions." And Barry Levinson will be right at the plate.

Mike Figgis: Man with a four-track mind
One of the most gratifying surprises of this year's Filmfest München was the revelation of an entire body of remarkable film and television work that many of us had never seen, or were even aware of. Renowned British filmmaker Mike Figgis, perhaps best known in the U.S. for Leaving Las Vegas, the groundbreaking Timecode, and memorable directing gigs with "The Sopranos," was honored with a retrospective. The first ever to encompass his entire oeuvre, it spanned 32 films and TV programs, among them some 10 "Hollywood Conversations" featuring intimate interviews with Mel Gibson, Jodie Foster, Salma Hayek, and others. As his pièce de résistance, Figgis wowed a full house with a "live mix" of Timecode.

In a podium discussion immediately preceding the live mix, Figgis told the eager audience who besieged the podium with cameras, pens and programs, and were finally persuaded to take their seats--that he has done 15-20 of these "live mixes," in which he plays with the pacing, dialogue, and score of the four split-screen stories. Noting that Figgis had added a fifth soundtrack for this screening, the Filmfest programmer observed that the mixing of Timecode (as indeed the film itself) can be seen on so many levels--cinematic, musical, philosophical, artistic--that it concerns "not only cinema as we know it, but the future of cinema as we know it."

"What's incredible for me is that it's a new film every time," Figgis told the audience. The film, released in 2000, is "not finished; it never will be finished. There's nothing like doing it in a live theater, because things can go wrong," he added. "[But] the more I do it, the more I feel competent to take a chance and try something new... I can't think of another experience in my career of making films that's anything like this." Confessing that he gets upset when people say "It's a nice gimmick" or "It's a nice card trick," Figgis avowed that it's a "very serious genre," not a "gimmick" or "card trick," and that he is "always looking for a new way to use cinema... [while] I love cinema, I'm also completely bored with it."

Asked about the scene in which the young filmmaker comes in to passionately pitch her film, which is structured like Timecode, and is ridiculed--"it's almost like you're ridiculing yourself"--Figgis confessed that critics can be a bear. They can be "insightful once in a while," but "they also can be completely mindlessly cruel and destructive." And on occasion pretentious, to the point where "I've had conversations about my work that I don't understand" and "I've felt stupid talking about my own work." And then there are those find "more in my films than I put into them." So he inserted two characters who would play out that "Andy Warhol sort of situation," where "if I say it's art, it's art," and anticipate the type of dialogue that might ensue in some quarters when the film came out.

Figgis said he thought it was "kind of an interesting dialogue to have within the film," because "we've turned the audience into a bunch of zombies in the dark; we are no longer proactive, we are reactive... it's where we go to kind of zone out, but we don't participate. We did it in kind of a comic way, but I agree with everything she says." Recalling Hitchcock's famous long takes in Rope and Under Capricorn, which the advent of sound ostensibly favored, Figgis was asked whether Timecode heralded their resurgence. The operative factor is the kind of film you're doing, he answered, although long takes should not be overused: "Film is not theater." And while the inspiration for Timecode derived, in fact, from his interest in the new video equipment, it may be that the "cinematic cart is pulling the horse: cinema equipment is leading cinema innovation."

An accomplished musician, Figgis conceives his films like a string quartet, where each player goes off into a room to practice, then all come together to make it work as a whole. The analogy is not superficial: Figgis actually used music paper to write the script for Timecode, with each line representing a minute of screen time, then went about teaching the cast of 30 to "read music as film," giving each person his own dialogue and counting on the four separate tracks to come together when the filming started. Each time he made a change, the actors would make the corresponding change on the music paper.

What's great about these live mixes, Figgis said, is that it puts you back in touch with the audience; it's like theater (an instructive counterpoint to his earlier assertion that film, in its usual state, is not theater), where the audience really doesn't know what will come next, and he can feed off their anticipation and their presence.

(At the live mix later that evening, we learned some interesting "insider stuff" about the film. Figgis told us that in the original film, he was at the bottom right-hand camera. In production, he began shooting one film a day, but when the studio complained, increased it to two a day. When it came to the earthquake, he told the actors to do their own "earthquake acting," their own "vision," as it were, compelling him to employ what he called "earthquake choreography" for the scene. The live mix itself included rewinds of selected shots and scenes, featured certain actors more than others, and included additional, and different, music. It was not, he emphasized, what you'll find on the DVD.)

Asked to say a few words about scoring his films, Figgis affirmed that music is key: "I could play Mahler and have a dog piss against the wall and you'd find it incredibly profound and moving." On the other hand, using great music can be a problem, not only bringing with it its own associations, but heightening the emotional impact of whatever scene it accompanies, which can be problematic for the director: nothing can follow it.

Proceeding to the "Hollywood Conversations," Figgis said that in conceiving them, he decided to pare it down to bare-bones, with just a single camera on the person being interviewed. Was part of his motivation to get back at Hollywood for treating him shabbily? Figgis firmly denied any bad feelings, declaring that he never wanted to take revenge on Hollywood, and was in fact "entirely complicit": anyone who gets into the game, he said, knows that the same people who fawn over you one day will ignore you the next, and be your best buddy the day after; it's the business. When it comes to Hollywood executives, Figgis said, their power gives them the ability to say the most outrageous, insulting things to people: "If they said some of those things to you in a pub in London, you'd say 'Please step outside,' but it's all because of the money. How low will you go for the money?" Mel Gibson expressed similar sentiments to Mike in his 1999 "Hollywood Conversations" interview (see below).

And what does the future hold for Mike Figgis? If you were eagerly anticipating Guilty Pleasure, announced in late 2004 as "a thriller about a young couple who engage in a ménage à trois as a last sexual fling before their wedding," yours (pleasure, that is, guilty or otherwise) will have to be put on hold. The studio had problems with the script, and asked Mike to fix it. He set assiduously to work--not sure where the problem was, but willing to rework the script to give them what they wanted--rewrote the first two acts, and sent it off. Their reply? The first two acts were fine; it was the third act that needed work. Guilty Pleasure: not coming to a theater near you, at least for a while (and Figgis left the impression that it may never see the light of day).

But a whole slew of Figgis films and TV shows did come to Filmfest München. I was able to see a choice few of them, including one of the "Hollywood Conversations," a series of half-hour interviews with actors and directors that Figgis produced and conducted for British TV. (They were later published in an anthology, "Projections 10: Hollywood Film-Makers on Film-Making," Faber & Faber, February 2000.) By luck or skill, the one I managed to see was the interview with no-holds-barred Mel Gibson. It did not disappoint.

In a wide-ranging, stunningly candid conversation, Gibson heartily admits that he was "a great liar" as a boy growing up in Australia. He and Figgis then commiserate over the audition process--"You feel humiliated, watching [actors] prostitute themselves," says Gibson--and share their mutual, deep-seated fear of Christopher Walken who, they say, loves grim, horrific things and torture (we can only hope it stops at fictional representations of them) even more than Gibson does.

When it comes to the opposite sex, Gibson readily admits that they are "way above us"; men are the "storytellers." On the opposite side of the moral equation are producers, de facto arbiters of the "social contract" that rules Hollywood. Recalling some of their experiences in Hollywood, Gibson and Figgis agree on the common term that people in the business use when they get ripped off, or make a costly mistake: "school fees."

But you can't get mad, says Gibson equably; it's a given that you're going to get abused by people you're going to have to work with again. So you can't take it personally. "You have to choose what level of integrity you're coming in at. You need that kind of cockroach resilience to survive here."

Human Rights in Film
Survival of a more urgent kind was the subject of four films co-presented with Human Rights Watch. Land of the Blind (Robert Edwards, Great Britain/USA, 2006), an allegorical drama about the battle of freedom and idealism against political repression and corruption, is set in an unidentified future time and place (although 1984 is not far off), and features Ralph Fiennes as a soldier whose curiosity about the political prisoner (Donald Sutherland) he is assigned to guard by the country's Duce-like dictator leads him in a downward spiral that careens out of control.

Beginning as a Pythonesque slapstick-satire, it proceeds to commentary, both sharp-edged ("If voting could ever really change anything, it would be illegal") and subtle (after viciously killing his subordinate, who failed, the leader advises his dumbstruck colleague to read The 7 Secrets of Highly Effective People, adding: "It helped me tremendously"), but never really settles on one genre. There is an implicit indictment of the media--when Sutherland blinks TORTURE with his eyes, it is duly translated on TV by blithely blabbermouthed reporters; and in a send-up of a former president, the leader and his wife oozingly call each other "Mommy" and "Daddy." Returning to the literary, when Sutherland, now the leader, gathers his underlings around him, he exhorts them to dip their hands in the slain leader's blood--Julius Caesar, anyone? He then proceeds to become as power-hungry and corrupt as the leader he and Fiennes joined forces to overthrow--even more so, instituting a mullah-like theocracy with absolute power over not only his subjects' actions, but their thoughts. Cautionary tale, or fairy tale? Maybe a bit of both.

The next film thrust us into a stark reality whose cautionary value is well known, and whose horrors one could only wish were but fairy tales. KZ (Rex Bloomstein, Great Britain, 2005), is a potent study in dichotomies that makes its points deliberately, yet powerfully. Beginning with the bus that brings a score of chatty tourists to one of Austria's most infamous landmarks, the erstwhile concentration camp (Konzentrationslager, or "KZ") Mauthausen, it ends with the ineffable solitude of the camp's director, whose job has become his mission--at an increasingly untenable mental and emotional cost.

Entering the camp, visitors are greeted by a sober yet friendly baritone voice warning them that they will see but a watered-down version of what happened there, because to see what really happened would drive them mad. "And we want you to return with a sound mind, to further the cause of justice, peace, and truth." It seems to have the desired effect on at least some, who later give their impressions. A Nigerian man, asked what he learned there, goes to the heart of it, saying that the greatest horrors start with small indignities, and that if we learn to recognize them early on, we can stop them from growing out of control. (Those whose first taste of French literature was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "The Little Prince" will be time-capsuled back to its lesson of the baobab trees, small, yet insidiously voracious, which must be extirpated at the root to prevent them from overtaking entire forests.)

The director of the site admits that he is obsessively committed to its mission, reading, watching, and buying everything he can get his hands on relating to the Holocaust, on which he has become something of an authority. His tour for the camera crew includes a shot of the road signs for the camp which, he notes with disbelieving irony, are contingent to, and the same color as, the sign for the nearby inn and beer hall, where troubadours rousingly sing Mauthausen's praises as they greet the tourists. Interviews with residents produce a range of reactions, with most perhaps predictably defensive about their hometown or choice of residence. Interestingly, age is not an augur of reactions; both those born after the war and those who lived there at the time are equally blasé about the elephant in their room. Only one woman somewhat nervously acknowledges the inherent embarrassment, or at least discomfiting awareness, that informs her choice to live there.

The most telling sequence may be the interview with three SS widows who reminisce nostalgically, and with undisguised pride in their husbands' importance--fueled in no small measure, one suspects, by self-importance--about the "good old days." Reluctantly compelled by the interviewer's simple but insistent questions to recall what else was happening under their very noses, and at their own husbands' hands or under their supervision, two of the three begin to remember--"mounds" of living bodies piled up in the street like garbage, "babies and children... they were still moving,... the soldiers started shooting into them... then they stopped... the bodies were left to rot in the sun for days," says one, her friend and neighbor of some 60 years looking at her in disbelief. (Of course, her most indelible memory of those times was her wedding, a lavish affair held in the camp itself, with inmates--Theresienstadt-like presentable--providing the "entertainment.") The local priest, asked if he ever gets the question: "Where was God?" says no, he hasn't. But he has asked himself the question--and hasn't found an answer.

Introducing the film and its director, Rex Bloomstein, the Filmfest programmer noted that films such as this exemplified fest director Andreas Ströhl's conviction that the supposed "smallness" of documentaries was more a question of form and budget, than one of importance or resonance. (Affirming this judgment, director Barry Levinson later called the film Journey to Justice, which also deals with the Holocaust, "a documentary with the emotional power of a feature film." More on this film below.) Asked what inspired him to make KZ, Bloomstein told the audience that it was the appalling incongruity of the road signs and the beer hall, both within shouting distance of the camp, that resonated with him, and convinced him to make the film. At the same time, he acknowledged, the estimated 4,000 existing documentaries on the Holocaust beg the question of why there should be yet another: "What else is there to say?" The film itself answers this question powerfully. But further proof was to come.

At a Q&A following the screening, several in the audience identified themselves as children or grandchildren of survivors, or of fathers who worked in a concentration camp or served in the German army during the war. In an odd convergence, their wildly disparate experiences then, yielded similar reactions now: Whether survivors, perpetrators or unseeing observers, none want to discuss the subject to this day, even with their families. This microcosm alone offered, if one is needed, a telling answer to those questions.

The experience of survivors was recounted both filmically and personally as a sold-out theater followed Howard Triest's on-site narration of the story of his return to the land he fled as a teenager after years of terror at the hands of the Nazis in Journey to Justice (Steve Palackdharry, USA, 2005). His story was of more than historical interest here in the Munich Film Museum, for Munich was the home of his family for generations, so assimilated they felt "more German than Jewish; the fact that the [Nazis] later defined the Jewish religion as a race didn't alter that." Yet it was from here that they were torn, to die horrific deaths, with Howard and his younger sister Margot--after months of running and riding, hiding and being hidden, pursued, and occasionally helped--the only ones to escape. (Margot also helped 10 other children escape.)

The film uses never-before-seen documents, photos, and archival footage, much of it taken from Howard Triest's own files, to recount his harrowing journey from Munich to America, where, just a few years later, he joined the Army and served as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials. He recalled the equanimity with which Nazi officials described, "like bureaucrats," the inhuman torture and degradation inflicted on the camps' inmates, taking pride in having "exceeded their quotas." (Nuremberg, he reminded the audience, was chosen as the site of the trials because of the infamous Nuremberg Laws, which the Nazis drew up to put a "legal" stamp on their actions.) Recalling how he somehow managed to maintain his composure before Rudolf Hoess, the commandant at Auschwitz, where his parents were murdered, Triest acknowledged that he believed the sentence Hoess and others received--hanging--was "too easy for them."

Effectively mixing past and present--at times Triest becomes a photograph, observing the interviews or silently commenting on a still--Palackdharry's cinematic achievement is ably abetted by the photographic skill of Howard's son Glenn, who in a post-screening discussion admitted that he cannot completely relax in Germany, unlike his father, who now can. But his father has more than earned that ease, which was felt by all during the shoot, thanks in large part to the director; Margot told the audience that his open, honest, and relaxed manner enabled her to feel free to say things she had not even told her children, who were astonished and moved when they saw the film.

But children are the next generation, and Howard and Margot's meeting with the young couple who now live in their former Munich home is illuminating and heartwarming, as they exhibit a friendliness, openness and curiosity, and a willingness to question "accepted truths," that contrasts sharply with what the Triests experienced seventy years before. Their hopeful optimism remained with us, as did the film's indelible images, as we exited the theater.

In a "close encounters" panel discussion, directors Robert Edwards (Land of the Blind) and Rex Bloomstein (KZ) joined Sam Zarifi, Human Rights Watch, Asia; Robert Fischer, Filmfest München; and Marianne Heuwagen, Human Rights Watch, Berlin, to discuss Human Rights in Film.

Edwards, noting that he had been asked why he made a pessimistic film that doesn't "show how you can make things better," said he felt "you have to portray things as they are," and in that regard, his film was "a call to arms." On the other hand, he added, it could also be seen as an optimistic film, because the main character did what was right; just because he suffers does not mean he should not have acted as he did. While optimism may be necessary for people who work in organizations such as Human Rights Watch, in order to be able to do the work they do, he added, for others, optimism may not be warranted in a world where governments are still establishing "ministries of virtue" that violate people's rights.

Asked why he selected these particular films, Fischer replied that Land of the Blind and KZ were selected for their differences as well as for their similarities. While the first is a big-budget Hollywood film with big-name stars, and the second a film shot in digital video with a small budget and non-actors who speak, unscripted, directly to the camera, both films leave it to the viewer's own judgment, unlike films that implicitly impose one.

Noting, as he did before the screening audience, that there have been over 4,000 documentaries on the Holocaust, Bloomstein observed that the motto "Never again" has become a joke, because it keeps happening again. Asked if the information obtained in the edifying interviews of the camp's tour guides was planned or serendipitous, Bloomstein replied that he shot over 150 hours of recorded interviews, so he had a good amount of material to choose from.

Film is a vital tool, the panel generally agreed, because "the people who control the images control the message." Fischer remarked that while there had not been a political cinema in France for decades, suddenly, no doubt reflecting the social and political situation, there is one again. Indeed, the line-up of French films this year included two that dealt explicitly with political issues of the sixties: I Saw Ben Barka Get Killed (Serge Le Péron, France, 2005) and October 17, 1961 (Alain Tasma, France, 2005), the latter described by Keith Uhlich of Slant magazine as "a gripping... video docudrama of the infamous night when the racial tensions between the Parisian police and the Algerian underclass... came to a head." In a memorable line from that film, a young woman tells her friend: "You can pretend not to see, but once you do see, you have to act. You have no choice." That line spoke eloquently to the Human Rights films, and to others at the fest as well.

Films on Human Rights
Set in the tinderbox of Tangiers between the massive destruction of World War II and the riots of October 17, 1961, For Bread Alone (Rachid Benhadj, Italy/France/Morocco, 2005), based on the best-selling autobiography by Mohamed Choukri, is at once timely and timeless, with echoes that reverberate disturbingly into the present and potentially into the future. Beginning as a story of incredible deprivation and abuse, it ends as an inspiring paean to persistence, pluck and resourcefulness and the transformative power of education, while never allowing the horrors of the past to fade entirely from our consciousness.

The film's effectiveness lies, for one, in its ability to meld the historical--we watch as the conspicuously wealthy French occupiers eat, drink, and party without even a backward glance at their suffering neighbors, whose urchin children beg pedestrians for food--with the personal. We see the the boy watch his mother savagely beaten by his drunken, unemployed father who, in an act of rage, smothers the younger brother for crying, uncontrollably, for food. It is also rich in imagery: In one unforgettable scene, we see the adolescent Choukri watch with hungry eyes as the daughter of his protector bathes. Stealing her panties as they hang out to dry, he nails them to a wall, tacks two huge oranges above them, and slowly, sensually, gnaws the luscious fruit. (The book, published in 1952, was banned for some thirty years in many Middle Eastern countries for its sexual explicitness.)

For all its depictions of abuse and pain--the prison guards come off as not only gratuitously cruel but irredeemably corrupt, taking as much pleasure in tormenting the inmates as in robbing them--the film concludes on an emotional high note that is neither contrived nor improbable. Its ringing testament to not just the value, but the urgency, of education should make even blasé or discouraged high-schoolers rethink any reflexive dismissal of them. (If the film, which also screened at Cannes and Montreal this year, doesn't make it to our area, the book is available at the Library of Congress, the Arlington Public Library, and the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore.)

All in the (immediate) family: The Makhmalbafs
As Barry Levinson's films often revolve around families, Mike Figgis has wrestled with the powers that be, and human rights remains a vital topic for films from every corner of the globe, there is a single family whose lives and films join many of these elements. This year, Filmfest München presented virtually the entire oeuvre of this distinguished family of filmmakers, in the biggest retrospective of their films ever held: the Makhmalbafs.

In addition to screening their films--from the first, father Mohsen's Nassouh's Repentance (1982), to the most recent: his Scream of the Ants (2006), which premiered there; from the youngest child, Hana, probably the youngest cineaste to have a film presented at Venice, to the middle son Maysam, whose premiere film was warmly received at the fest; to the eldest, the estimable Samira, whose At Five in the Afternoon (2003) won two awards at Cannes, to wife and step-mother Marzieh Meshkini, whose Stray Dogs (below) and The Day I Became a Woman are worthy additions to the canon--the fest also offered a thought-provoking "close encounters" panel discussion with the entire family, conducted by Klaus Eder, Filmfest München programmer. (To facilitate reading, Samira, Maysam, and Hana Makhmalbaf are henceforth identified by first name only.)

When one sees an Iranian movie, posited Eder, there is something in the language of the image that immediately identifies it as an Iranian film. An outsider who is relatively unfamiliar with Iranian cinema may see the similarities, responded Makhmalbaf, but seen "from inside," there are many differences. If there are similarities, he added, they may lie in the fact that in Iranian cinema, the cinematic image is a translation of the literary image. There is a very strong storytelling tradition in Iran. Cinema, he taught his children, like any art, is divided into two parts: what you want to say, and how you say it.

How did he come up with the idea of a family of filmmakers? The family always came with him whenever he shot a film, and saw behind the scenes. Samira decided at 14 that she didn't want to go to school, she wanted to make films, and he agreed; the others followed. But it was not at all a year-round vacation. Sometimes there were 16-hour days in the car, traveling from one place to the next, meeting and learning about people of different cultures in different situations, hauling out camera equipment, setting up scenes; it was work and education combined.

Samira noted that she was always a good student in school, but that education was always framed in terms of its value in getting a husband. "I wanted to do more with my life." Another thing that bothered her was that the teachers always gave her answers instead of allowing or encouraging her to find them herself. (Indeed, in Vera Tschechowa’s Salam Cinema--The Makhmalbafs and Their Films (Germany, 2005), father Mohsen says, "You go to school to learn how to be like other people. Education should [instead] teach you how to find out who you are and what you can do.")

Their father wouldn't let them watch TV, she recalled, but one day she saw a program at a friend's home about two girls in Afghanistan whose father had imprisoned them in a small room in the house behind iron bars, ostensibly to protect them from the world. She was moved, seeing "how love could be hurtful, even if well-intentioned"; the story became her first film, The Apple (1997). Made at 17, in just eleven days--talk about quick studies!--it was screened in Official Selection at Cannes, and won the London Film Festival's Sutherland Trophy for best first feature. Maysam recalled how as children, he and Samira would make home movies and hide when their father came home, out of fear that they were no good. But his critiques were invaluable.

You clearly love your home country, said Eder; why don't you make films there anymore? Makhmalbaf's answer was a simple one: because the Iranian government won't let him. (In fact, as we learned in the aforementioned Salam Cinema--The Makhmalbafs and Their Films, his last two films were made without the required permit for a screenplay.) But he loves his country, and wouldn't live anywhere else. Afghanistan, where the Makhmalbafs have shot several films, has a similar language and culture, and even many of the same problems, but more freedoms, he added, and so is more conducive to filmmaking. Furiously productive, he has 15 scripts he'd love to shoot. Even Samira's internationally acclaimed At Five in the Afternoon (2003) was screened in Iran in a small, out-of-the way theater for a very short period, so hardly anyone saw it. Indeed, every year they shoot three or four films, but the government will not let them be shown there.

The family currently lives in Tajikistan, and their desire to move to France is stalled by that country's delay in processing the paperwork: until Iran renews their passports, France won't give them permanent visas. Samira, whose At Five in the Afternoon won both the Jury Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury at Cannes, called out from the podium: "We don't want your prizes! Give us a visa!"

Asked whether he was afraid that the magic of his films may be linked to Iran, and that he'll lose it if he leaves, Makhmalbaf reminded us that Tarkovsky left Russia for Italy, and made even better films! [According to imdb.com, Tarkovsky's last film, Offret (1986), won an almost unprecedented four prizes at Cannes.] Pressure can make you weak or strong, noted Samira, like a spring: You press on it and it goes down; when it comes up again, it's stronger than ever, because of the pressure it's been under. Her father, imprisoned and tortured under the Shah of Iran ("the only thing the revolution changed was the name of the king," he says in Salam Cinema), is living proof of his daughter's philosophy.

As is, it could be said, the filmic output of this remarkable family, which despite intense pressure is still producing creative cinema that is shot in other countries and embraced by cinephiles and audiences around the world, and yet remains essentially, profoundly Iranian.

A look at some of those films:

Serendipitously, a September 3 article in The Washington Post’s Travel section reports on the country’s love affair with Hollywood. Salaam Cinema (Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Iran 1994), not to be confused with son Maysam's similarly titled film, is an eye-opener for those unfamiliar with Iran beyond the usual media reports. The premise, Makhmalbaf tells readers of the ad he places in a Tehran newspaper, is a film to salute cinema on its 100th birthday. He invites all and sundry to audition for parts in this noble exercise, and sure enough, he is besieged with aspiring film stars--the men in jeans, the women duly dressed in full chador (and white tennis shoes)--convinced they're the next Paul Newman or Marilyn Monroe, and doing scenes, by heart, from the films that made them famous.

But Mohsen is a demanding and unpredictable taskmaster, alternately bullying them, sometimes to the point of tears, to repeat lines again and again; asking them embarrassing personal, and unanswerable philosophical, questions; manipulating their emotions and morals by pitting them against each other, then excoriating them for their selfishness or ruthlessness; imperiously throwing them out, then quickly changing his mind and allowing them back in--only to throw them out again. But the tough ones last, sometimes incisively turning his own words back on him (the women are especially good at this), and even learning from his example: Told that they are good enough to take his place and audition their colleagues, two of the women swiftly put the hapless ladies through the same torment, as though they were born to it.

An object lesson for Iranians, perhaps, but also for Westerners, who have a few demagogues in their own past. And an edifying, humanizing look at a people we sometimes see in dehumanizing shorthand. But then, the Makhmalbafs' films invariably offer this. Marzieh Meshkini's Stray Dogs (2004) follows a boy and his little sister through war-torn Afghanistan, where it was filmed. Told from the children's perspective, it would probably garner a PG-13 rating here (aside from some choice swear words used by the little ones, who have seen too much in their young lives), but would also be appreciated by anyone who wants more than the "nightly news" version of Afghanistan, and who cherishes good storytelling.

The film opens with a group of children on their way to school, who see a cute little terrier and, as kids will, pursue him. The pup falls into a hole, and the children, at the urging of one boy begin shouting at the dog, whose breed is apparently unfamiliar to them, and throwing lit torches into the hole: "He's a foreign dog!" yells one, "he won't understand us!" "He's an American dog!" yells another, "they killed the Taliban!" Two of the children, a boy and his sister, feeling compassion and concern for the little fellow, sneak in from behind, and extricate him from the hole. But what to do with him? Take him someplace safe, of course--to prison! Where he'll be cared for, or perhaps adopted, by one of the guards or inmates. And which prison? Well that's a no-brainer: the one their mother is in! Seems she's been sent to a horrific, primitive, barren dungeon of iron and stone that houses women who have somehow displeased their husbands or the authorities. (We get the impression that situations and prisons such as these are not anomalies in Afghanistan.)

Upon their reunion, the mother tells the girl, who is about five and perhaps seen as the more likely to sway the father's hard-heartedness, to go to the father to seek her release. We learn that her unpardonable offense was that, not having heard from her husband in several years and told that he was dead, she remarried. With two children to support, forbidden to work by cultural and religious (and possibly even state) law, she was in essence compelled to wed in order to feed her children. However, logic holds no sway with the father, who had her imprisoned upon learning of her marriage, and now is equally unimpressed by the children's pleas.

In desperation, they decide that their only hope is to somehow find a way to join their mother in that hellhole of a prison, and are advised by a street-wise urchin to see The Bicycle Thief, which is playing at the local cinema, for tips on how to get arrested as thieves. In a wink-wink at the adults in the audience, the ticket seller warns the kids that they're probably wasting their money; The Bicycle Thief is boring, it's an art film, nothing happens in it, nobody comes to see it. However, if they're determined, he'll sell them a ticket: "The dog gets in free."

The fierce loyalty of the two children to each other and their mother; their determination to stay together and find their place in a world of poverty, bleakness and desperation; the gentleness and love expressed by the little girl toward the dog--Stray Dogs may be too transparent a title, but on a very basic level, it works--and the occasional sly humor, make this a very human film.

In contrast, the most magical of all Makhmalbaf films must surely be father Mohsen's Once Upon a Time, Cinema (1991), which has been succinctly and cogently summarized in "Salaam Cinema: The Films of Mohsen Makhmalbaf" (Pacific Cinémathèque, Vancouver, British Columbia):

"...Once Upon a Time, Cinema (Nasseredin Shah, Actor-e Cinema) Makhmalbaf's "love letter to the Iranian cinema" (Deborah Young, Variety) is a free-for-all fantasia in the mode of Buster Keaton's Sherlock Junior or Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which "characters jump in and out of cameras, projector and screens, time goes backward and forward in melancholy leaps and actors appear in multiple roles" (Young, Variety). At the dawn of the 20th century, a Chaplin- like character known as the Cinematographer introduces the magic of movies to the Iranian court. The pompous Shah, who has 84 wives and 200 children, is dead-set against the pernicious influence of movies, but at the sight of his first film he falls madly in love with its damsel-in-distress heroine, and resolves to give up his kingdom and become an actor. Makhmalbaf has described the work as a "1001 Arabian Nights" of Iranian film history, and he pays fond tribute to his nation's cinema by seamlessly and inventively weaving myriad clips from classic Iranian movies into the screwball narrative. The film won major awards at the Karlovy Vary, Istanbul and Taormina festivals. Once Upon a Time, Cinema almost defies description as the complexity and imagination Makhmalbaf brings to it produce a dazzling visual roller coaster on which to sweep the viewer along. . . [a memorable] cinematic fairy tale" (Sheila Whitaker, London Film Festival)."

Young film critics and film journalists are invited to apply for The Talent Press to report on the films at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival (February 08-18, 2007) and on the events of the Berlinale Talent Campus (February 10-15, 2007). The Talent Press is a project of the Berlinale Talent Campus, Goethe-Institute, and FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics).

To be eligible you must be fluent in English (writing and speaking), be under 30 years of age, have published articles in newspapers, film magazines, websites or at universities, and be interested in reporting on films within the framework of the Berlin International Film Festival and events held during the Berlinale Talent Campus 2007. You will work equally in all fields of journalism: write interviews, reviews, reports, articles and features on the Festival and attend daily editorial meetings with mentors. Successful applicants will receive a share of the travel expenses, free accommodation in youth hostels in Berlin from February 8-16, 2007 and the opportunity to meet and be with 350 talented young filmmakers from all over the world and experiencethe day-to-day buzz of a prestigious "A" festival. You will be guided by Peter Cowrie, Oliver Baumgarten and other renowned film critics.

You can apply online. Include your curriculum vitae and up to three original copies of articles that you have published in the last two years. The deadline is November 1, 2006.

We are always looking for film-related material for the Storyboard. Our enthusiastic and well-traveled members have written about their trips to the Cannes Film Festival, London Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto Film Festival, Edinburgh Film Festival, the Berlin Film Festival, the Munich Film Festival, and the Locarno Film Festival. We also heard about what it's like being an extra in the movies. Have you gone to an interesting film festival? Have a favorite place to see movies that we aren't covering in the Calendar of Events? Seen a movie that blew you away? Read a film-related book? Gone to a film seminar? Interviewed a director? Taken notes at a Q&A? Read an article about something that didn't make our local news media? Send your contributions to Storyboard and share your stories with the membership. And we sincerely thank all our contributors for this issue of Storyboard.

FILMS

American Film Institute Silver Theater
The AFI concludes its "Heroic Grace" Chinese marial arts films in September as well as its retrospectives of David Lynch and Michael Haneke. The fourth annual DC Labor Fest takes place September 14-19 and the seventeenth annual Latin American Film Festival begins September 20. A retrospective of Pedro Almodovar's films begins September 15. Special events include The French Connection (1971) with Director William Friedkin and writer George Pelecanos appearing in person on September 10 at 3:00pm and the award-winning documentary The Widow Colony (Harpreet Kaur) on September 9 at 1:00pm with a panel discussion following the screening.

Freer Gallery of Art
A series of four films by Korean director Lee Man-hee (1931-1975) begin on September 15 at 7:00pm with A Road to Return (1967). On September 17 at 2:00pm is Water Mill (1966). On September 27 at 7:00pm is The Devil's Stairway (1964) and on September 24 at 2:00pm is Road to Sampo (1972). The Freer hosts three films in The 2006 DC Asian Pacific American Film Festival: on September 29 is I for India (Sandhya Suri, 2005), with two more in October.

National Gallery of Art
Films by French director Benoit Jacquot will be shown at both the Gallery and the AFI. The Gallery series focuses on Jacquot's literary adaptations: on September 3 at 4:00pm is The Musician Killer (1974), based on a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; on September 9 at 3:00pm is The False Servant (1999) based on Pierre de Marivaux's comedy of manners, shown with Elvire Jouvet 40 (1986). On September 17 at 5:00pm is Marianne (1997) based on another Pierre de Marivaux novel; on September 23 at 2:30pm is The Wings of the Dove (1981), based on Henry James' 1902 novel; and on September 24 at 4:30pm is Tosca (2001) based on Puccini's opera.

Notes on Marie Menken (Martina Kudlacek, 2006) on September 1 at 12:30pm and September 3 at 2:00pm is a portrait of the experimental filmmaker who inspired Andy Warhol. The Sentimental Bloke (Raymond Longford and Littie Lyell, 1919) is a premiere of an Australian restoration with orchestral accompaniment on September 10 at 5:00pm. Au Bonheur des Dames (Julien Duvivier, 1929) on September 30 at 3:00pm has live orchestral accompaniment by Octuor de France.

National Museum of African Art
All About Darfur (Tahgreed Elsanhouri, 2005) investigates the eyewitness accounts of massacre, rape and destruction in farming communities of Darfus.

National Museum of the American Indian
On September 29 at 7:00pm and September 30 at 1:30pm is Spiral of Fire (Carol Cornsilk, 2005) followed by discussion with the writer, LeAnne Howe.

National Portrait Gallery
A three film series of Gordon Park films begins on September 21 at 6:30pm with Shaft (1971), followed by discussion with Ed Guerrero, New York Univesity film professor and author of Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film. On September 22 at 7:00pm is Lead Belly (1976) about bluesman Huddie William Ledbetter and on September 23 at 2:00pm is The Learning Tree (1969), the first major studio feature film directed by an African American filmmaker. A discussion with actor and filmmaker S. Pearl Sharp will follow.

National Museum of Women in the Arts
As part of the "Sister in Cinema" series, Coquie Hughes' If I Wuz Yo Gyrl (2003), a work-in-progress about domestic abuse. The filmmaker will attend the screening and discuss her work.

Films on the Hill
Films on the Hill presents a series of films all based on well-known plays and/or novels. On September 13 at 7:00pm is Twinkletoes (Charles Brabin, 1926, silent with theater organ music track) starring Colleen Moore as an aspiring dancer in London's Limehouse slum and based on the novel by Thomas Burke. On September 16 at 7:00pm is Arsene Lupin (Jack Conway, 1931) notable as the first feature film starring both Barrymore brothers--John and Lionel--and based on the play by Maurice LeBlanc. On September 20 at 7:00pm is The Other Side (Heinz Paul, 1931), starring Conrad Veidt, a German version (with English subtitles) of R.C. Sherriff's powerful and eloquent anti-war play Journey's End.

Washington Jewish Community Center
On September 18 at 7:30pm is a documentary Fired! (Chris Bradley and Kyle Le Brache, 2006), interviews with people who have been fired from their jobs. Producer Annabelle Gurwitch will discuss the film after the screening. On September 25 at 7:30pm is an encore presentation of Go for Zucker! (Dani Levy, 2004), a groundbreaking German comedy about a Jewish family.

Pickford Theater
A series of comedies "Bob Hope and the American Comedy Tradition" continues in September with The Facts of Life (Melvin Frank, 1960) on September 1 at 7:00pm, The Comedy of Terrors (Jacques Tourneur, 1963) on September 15 at 7:00pm, The Iron Petticoat (Ralph Thomas, 1956) on September 19 at 7:00pm, and That Certain Feeling (Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, 1956) on September 26 at 7:00pm. Check the website for more films in this series.

Goethe Institute
"Satire in Film" is the topic of a series of films beginning with a documentary The Tramp and the Dictator (Kevin Brownlow, 2002) on September 11 at 6:00pm, followed by Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator (1940) at 7:15pm. On September 18 at 6:30pm is Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1964) and on September 25 at 6:30pm is The Kaiser's Lackey (Wolfgang Staudte, 1951). More in October. A children's film Emil and the Detectives (Franziska Buch, 2000) is on September 16 at 2:00pm.

French Embassy
On September 6 at 7:00pm is a comedy featuring Carole Bouqet Housewarming (Brigitte Roüan, 2005), followed by a wine reception.

The Avalon
On September 10 at 7:30pm is 9/12: From Chaos to Community, about a group of New York City volunteers in the World Trade Center recovery effort and their relationships with the rescue and recovery workers. On September 20 at 8:00pm is Not Here to Be Loved (Stéphane Brizé, 2005), part of the French Cinémathèque series. On September 21 at 7:30pm is the 9th annual "Manhattan Short Film Festival", a program of 12 short films from around the world. As part of the "indieWIRE Undiscovered Gems" series is Room on September 27 at 8:00pm. Director Laura Poitras will make three special appearances to discuss her documentary My Country My Country on September 1 at 8:00pm, September 2 at 5:30pm and, with local film historian Max Alvarez moderating the discussion, on September 2 at 8:00pm.

The 17th Annual Latin American Film Festival
Beginning September 20 and running until October 8, more than 30 films from Latin America, Spain and Portugal will be shown in the 17th annual Latin American International Film Festival. Films include The Aura (2005) from Argentina by the writer/director of the hit film Nine Queens Fabián Bielinsky, on September 23 and 28; In Evil Hour (2005), an adaptation of a Gabriel García Márquez work by Brazilian master Ruy Guerra on September 20 and 21; Rosario Tijeras (Emilio Maillé, 2005), a box office hit in Colombia on September 29 and 30; Love in the Time of Hysteria (1991) from Mexico's Alfonso Cuarón on September 22 and 23; and lots more. See the website.

DC Labor Filmfest
From September 14-19 is an array of new and classic films about work and workers, from the American office place to global factories. Films include Office Space, A Day Without a Mexican, Workingman's Death and Man Push Cart. All films are at the AFI's Silver Theater.

DC Shorts Film Festival
The third annual showcase of 94 independent short films from around the world takes place from September 14-17. Many films will be represented by a filmmaker connected to its production and most are screened at Landmark's E Street Theater with two programs at the Embassy of Canada. Check out the website for the full schedule.

The Amnesty International Film Festival
The second annual Amnesty International Film Festival, co-sponsored by National Geographic features eight documentary and feature films on some of the most important issues facing the global community. Films include All About Darfur, Black Gold, Catch a Fire, Golden Venture, Mario's Story, Salvador, The Ground Truth, and The World According to Sesame Street. Films are screened at the National Geographic Society's auditorium; refer to the website for the exact schedule.

Asian Pacific American Film Festival
The 7th Annual DC APA Film Festival runs from September 28 to October 7, hosting the best of Asian American cinema including feature films, documentaries, and shorts. Locations vary, check the website.

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August, 2006
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February, 2006
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December, 2005
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September, 2005