The American Film Institute

AFI Fest Black & White Nights-Day 4

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Photos from the 2012 AFI FEST presented by Audi Special Screening of THE IMPOSSIBLE at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Nov. 4, 2012 in Hollywood, CA.

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Weekend’s Over but AFI FEST Continues!

After a fantastic weekend wall-to-wall with exciting screenings, we’re entering the work week full speed ahead.

Our Gala tonight is RUST AND BONE, an unusual love story between a back alley boxer and a woman who has suffered a profound loss.

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

Media check-in: 5:30 p.m.
Red carpet arrivals: 6:30 p.m.
Program begins: 7:30 p.m.

Expected appearances: Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jacques Audiard, Thomas Bidegain, Michael Barker and Tom Bernard, Greg Araki, Katie Aselton, Susanne Bier, Frank Coraci, Michael De Luca, Patrick deWitt, Alison Dickey, Mark Duplass, Jay Duplass, Richard Grieco, Shiloh Fernandez, Cloris Leachman, Alex Lombard, Benjamin Millepied, John C. Reilly, John Savage and Hal Sparks.

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Election Night Results Party

Democrat, Republican or Third Party member, cast your vote on Election Day, Tuesday, November 6, and spend your evening at AFI FEST’s Election Night Results Party!

All pass- and ticket-holders are invited to our Cinema Lounge at the Roosevelt Hotel beginning at 6:00 p.m. We’ll have plasma screen coverage of the election returns on multiple networks—plus an open bar and snacks.

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Photos from Day 4 of AFI FEST presented by Audi.

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AFI Fest Black & White Nights-Day 3

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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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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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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.