One Maritime Step for Man

KON-TIKI
11/05/12 - Egyptian, 7:15 p.m.
11/06/12 - Grauman’s Chinese, 4:00 p.m.

By Andrew Johnson

It’s been three weeks since Felix Baumgartner stepped off a capsule 24 miles above the earth and three months since NASA successfully shot a car-sized rover onto the surface of Mars. The desire to break boundaries and explore new territory is a fundamental characteristic of humanity, which is perhaps why there’s been little display of nationalism in the aftermath — there’s a sense that when one of us attempts the seemingly impossible, we’re all in it together regardless of race, nation or creed.

KON-TIKI is based on the real-life story of another odds-defying pioneer, Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl, who sailed 4,300 miles across the Pacific in 1947 on a raft made of balsa wood. He hoped to prove that the Polynesian islands had originally been settled by people from South America rather than Southeast Asia, a theory that remains disputed despite his successful journey. Filmmakers Joachim Roenning and Espen Sandberg (MAX MANUS: MAN OF WAR) have now fashioned the trip into a narrative feature film, and the result is a rousing and provocative tale of survival and human achievement.

At first glance, it’s easy to imagine that KON-TIKI is Norway’s submission to the Oscars® simply because it contains so many elements Academy voters tend to reward — it’s a period piece about good-looking actors getting really dirty as they overcome nearly impossible odds. The marketing campaign might very well bill it as an “inspirational true story” about the “triumph of the human spirit” or something similarly clichéd. What makes the film so impressive is that while it is indeed both those things, it’s also much more than typical feel-good fluff. It would be easy to interpret Heyerdahl’s journey only as survivalist epic, the story of a few men versus the elements, but Roenning and Sandberg use that as a launching point to ask more complicated questions.

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4 November 2 Permalink

Ken Burns and THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE

THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE
11/03/12 - Egyptian, 3:30 p.m.
11/05/12 - Chinese 2, 1:15 p.m. 

By Paul Bradley

In a democratic society when a horrific crime happens, the appropriate response is to seek out the responsible party in order to bring about safe and certain justice. However, in a culture defined by class and racial divisions, democratic ideals can all too easily be perverted by paranoia and the machinations of those who profit from such divisions. In 1989 in New York City, five kids with a minority skin color and a lower economic lineage were portrayed as monsters and sacrificed to an institutional machine, robbing them of their youth.

Documentary legend Ken Burns and his daughter Sarah Burns, along with her husband David McMahon, have added an indispensable thread to the giant Burns tapestry of Americana by telling those five kids’ story in THE CENTRAL PARK FIVE. AFI FEST Now was privileged to sit in on a conversation with both Burns, McMahon and three of the five gentlemen: Yusuf Salaam, Raymond Santana and Korey Wise.

Burns, when asked exactly why he chose a contemporary story with race at the center, given the size and scope of his previous subjects, pointed out the inescapabilty of race in his work:

“Almost every film that we’ve done has touched on or come up against the question of race in America. The Civil War wouldn’t have happened without four million Americans being owned by other Americans. The finest moment in the history of baseball is when Jackie Robinson first plays on April 15, 1947. The only art form that Americans have created was created by a community that has an experience of being unfree in a supposedly free land — that’s Jazz music. I’ve done biographies of Jack Johnson, the first African American heavyweight champion.

We did a biography of Thomas Jefferson, the author of our racial disease, who could sit there and distill a century of enlightenment thinking into one sentence that begins, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal,’ but oops, he owns more than a hundred human beings and doesn’t see the contradiction or the hypocrisy or the need to free any of them in his lifetime — and so set in motion the American narrative that’s dominated by the question of race.”

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4 November 3 Permalink

Day 4, Fall Back … and Spring Forward!

We hope you all set your clocks back last night, got an extra hour of sleep, and are ready for a full day of AFI FEST screenings!

Our Gala tonight is RISE OF THE GUARDIANS in 3D, an epic adventure that spins the tale of a group of heroes, each with extraordinary abilities.

Grauman’s Chinese Theatre
6925 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood, CA 90028

Media check-in: 2:00 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 3:00 p.m.
Program begins: 4:00 p.m.

Our Special Screenings for today:

THE IMPOSSIBLE is a powerful story based on one family’s survival of Thailand’s 2004 tsunami.

Media check-in: 7:15 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 8:00 p.m.
Program begins: 8:30 p.m.

QUARTET is an ambitious debut drama from Dustin Hoffman about a birthday concert for Verdi at a home for retired opera singers.

Media check-in: 7:45 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 8:30 p.m.
Program begins: 9:00 p.m. (at the Egyptian Theatre)

ROOM 237 delves into the symbols and motifs in Stanley Kubrick’s THE SHINING.

Media check-in: 7:15 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 8:30 p.m.
Program begins: 9:00 p.m.

Expected appearances: RISE OF THE GUARDIANS in 3D (Alec Baldwin, Peter Ramsey, Christina Steinberg, Nancy Bernstein, William Joyce, Jackson Brundage, Max Charles, Carlos Knight and Ryan Potter); THE IMPOSSIBLE (Ewan McGregor, J.A. Bayona, Sergio G. Sánchez and Belén Atienza); QUARTET (Dustin Hoffman); ROOM 237 (John Fell Ryan, Rodney Ascher and producer Tim Kirk).

4 November 1 Permalink

Waking from the Nightmare, One Frame at a Time

FAMILY NIGHTMARE
11/04/12 - Chinese 6, 9:30 p.m.
11/07/12 - Chinese 2, 6:45 p.m.

By Andrew Johnson

FAMILY NIGHTMARE is just that: a surreal, terrifying look at familial dysfunction. Director Dustin Guy Defa’s short film — playing at the festival as part of SHORTS PROGRAM THREE — is comprised of old VHS clips of a Christmas gathering. It’s technically a documentary in that it’s a piece of home video, but it has more in common with the found-footage horror subgenre than traditional non-fiction storytelling. The images are real, but the culminating effect of Defa’s editing and sound mix is a terrifying interpretation of history that asks if artistic manipulation can reveal a greater truth than reality itself.

The opening shot presents an innocent toddler, seated on a couch, not a care in the world. It would be a charming opening scene…if he weren’t holding a knife. It’s an image that encapsulates the themes of what will follow: what appears harmless on the surface might be masking terrifying secrets. A bottle of alcohol isn’t just a Christmas gift, it’s a sign of crippling addiction. The men watching television could either be bored by the party or degenerates in disguise. The elderly woman receiving gifts might be a valued member of the family, or maybe she’s just a forgotten shell of her former self.

Defa has dubbed over the soundtrack himself, lending a sinister quality to images that might otherwise seem perfectly normal. What begins as a few bizarre voices gradually becomes a cacophony of warped noise. Casual jabs are now scathing insults, Christmas carols are satanic chants, and the off-screen whimpers of an unseen child suggest oceans of abuse bubbling behind closed doors. These aren’t the exclamations of jubilant partiers, they’re the frustrated cries of broken souls, trapped in cycles of destruction from which there’s no escape.

And in the background of it all: the children. Will they follow in their parents’ footsteps? Are they doomed to end up like Grandma, staring blankly at the empty lives they’ll one day leave behind, wondering what it all means?

Defa is clearly a man preoccupied with the recorded image. His last film was the hauntingly melancholic feature BAD FEVER, which followed a well-meaning loner through his often painful attempts at human connection. In that movie, video recording became a tool of manipulation and deceit, as if filming fictional scenarios might suddenly render them real. FAMILY NIGHTMARE functions as the opposite, reality turned fantastic in post-production, and in straddling the line between fact and fiction Defa reveals the essence of art.

Seemingly inconsequential events take on universal importance, and what could otherwise be a random collection of clips is given a coherent, if loose, narrative structure. FAMILY NIGHTMARE reminds us in 10 minutes what longer features (CLOUD ATLAS is the most recent example) often struggle to communicate: that every day and every person is a single piece in a larger cosmic story. The idea that we’re all connected might seem a cliché, but the photographic image proves it correct, acting as a bridge across time and generations.

Sometimes the only way to escape the past is to confront it. If hindsight is 20/20, the films of the past may provide insight into our present, and by documenting our reality we can transform it into something greater. The fate of FAMILY NIGHTMARE’s narrator remains unknown, but perhaps by examining this footage and editing it into something new, Defa has managed to wake up from his nightmare.

Andrew Johnson is a freelance journalist and the founder of Film Geek Radio, a network of film-and-TV-themed podcasts.

4 November 1 Permalink

The Rules of the Game

IN ANOTHER COUNTRY
11/04/12 - Chinese 5, 7:30 p.m. 

By Samuel Anderson

Writer-director Hong Sang-soo gives the impression in his latest works of being capable of making films almost automatically. Such effortlessness can seem like a sign of a filmmaker going through the motions, and Hong does not exactly run from this danger, returning to similar territory with each film.

But to take this repetition as a sign of someone who has run out of ideas is to miss what makes Hong Sang-soo such a provocative, and essential, artist. It is not that he makes films simply for the sake of making films — though it seems he is never not making a film, having made five in the past four years and is apparently in post-production on another. Rather, making a film is for him an activity like eating or drinking; an activity ones takes up as a matter of living. It is not strictly an activity done for the sake of an audience, but it is a social activity, and in Hong’s films, there is an appeal to us as viewers to share in the experience in a unique way.

As his career has developed, and as he has sped up his production process by working on video, Hong has stripped his singular style down to its essential elements; to the point, precisely, where filmmaking can become something like a natural activity. This has brought out a new strand of playfulness in his work, of which IN ANOTHER COUNTRY is a prime example.

The film foregrounds its simplicity: a young woman is stuck in a small seaside town with her mother, both victims of her uncle’s unscrupulous financial dealings; she expresses her frustration by writing three short screenplays, each of which centers around a French woman visiting the town, and each of which plays out onscreen.

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4 November 1 Permalink