Post(s) tagged with "fest feed"
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.
The red carpet of RISE OF THE GUARDIANS in 3D.
The Hollywood Reporter Panel on A SESSION BEHIND THE TALENT OF THE SESSIONS.
Filmmaker interviews.
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.
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.”
Director Kim Ki-Duk at a Q & A on PIETA with Lane Kneedler, AFI FEST Associate Director of Programming.
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).
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.
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.
PEARBLOSSOM HWY
11/04/12 - Chinese 6, 7:00 p.m.
11/07/12 - Chinese 1, 1:45 p.m.
By Katie Datko
On a map, the real Pearblossom Highway looks kind of like a scar bisecting northern LA County, a jagged stretch of mostly two-lane highway heading from the suburbs just north of LA east to the high desert. It’s probably no coincidence, then, that PEARBLOSSOM HWY, Mike Ott’s follow-up feature to his multiple award-winning indie film festival sensation LiTTLEROCK (which played at AFI FEST 2010 and won the Audience Award) is about wounds — specifically, the need to heal the fractures caused by denial or neglect and the longing for belonging and acceptance.
Partly based on the real lives of the main characters, Cory (Cory Zacharia) and Atsuko (Atsuko Okatsuka), PEARBLOSSOM HWY is a humanistic yet barbed tale, darker and in many ways more poignant than its predecessor. The characters may be familiar to Ott fans, but both Cory and Atsuko have been given new back-stories. Cory is an unemployed whippet-huffing, orphaned rockstar-wannabe who longs to make it on reality TV. Atskuo, Cory’s friend and videographer who’s also an urchin of sorts, has been sent by her Japanese grandmother to live in Antelope Valley with her uncle’s family while trying to pass the U.S. citizenship test.
In PEARBLOSSOM HWY, Ott pushes the envelope on all levels. The intertwining narrative threads of the two main characters’ rites of passage mirror each other: Cory makes tapes for his TV show audition and manages to reconnect with his older brother, Jeff (John Brotherton); Atsuko raises money to go back to Japan to visit her ailing grandmother the only way she knows how — by selling herself — becoming increasingly more detached as the film progresses.
It might seem as though Cory’s story is front and center, but it’s really Atsuko’s journey that commands the viewer’s attention. Even though it’s unnerving on many levels, we get a clear sense of her slow unraveling — framed through mirrors, windows and montages of highways and truck stops. Atsuko’s first scene with a Japanese client shows her standing against a curtained window, her client’s voice off-screen. While she may seem childlike and innocent, she nevertheless stands her ground, asserts herself and, interestingly, speaks back to him not as a coy, deferential call girl, but using an informal, familiar tone. Even though Atsuko’s image becomes increasingly refracted, it is through her language that she seems to hold onto her sense of ‘self.’
LEVIATHAN
11/04/12 - Chinese 2, 7:15 p.m.
By Brad Franklin
LEVIATHAN is a film that is both unique and indefinable. It is easier to say what it isn’t than what it is. It is not a typical documentary. Its subject is commercial fishing off the New Bedford Coast of Massachusetts, but it does not treat its subject as a documentary would. There is no narration. There is no (discernible) dialogue. The only non-visual communication between the filmmakers and the viewer is a biblical quote from Job (made ominous with a scary font) that elucidates the film’s title and an endnote honoring the countless vessels and crew lost in the very waters where they filmed. These are not negatives. These stylistic choices are what make the film a truly immersive experience in a way that no IMAX documentary could.
In essence, it’s a visual diary portrayed in hyper-realistic terms. The directors employ an essentially raw form of filmmaking by simply shooting the environment of a fishing vessel with cameras placed at impossible-seeming angles from improbable perspectives, leaving their intent equivocal. Sharp cuts interrupt uncommonly long scenes that encourage the viewer to absorb the full spectrum of emotion and information that the camera captures, which involve all facets of life and death on the boat. The camera is not passive; it is always interfacing with what it’s shooting. A single scene can illuminate the brutal and transient nature of life, and evoke awe and wonder at the glory of creation.
Despite its raw, HD video aesthetic, directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor (SWEETGRASS, AFI FEST 2009) and Véréna Paravel (FOREIGN PARTS) have crafted a beautiful and arresting record of modern life at sea. LEVIATHAN presents a common-seeming vocation as an encounter with the sublime. This is complemented with an artful eye toward edits. It is not always clear if an edit has been made, if the camera jumped or if something in the environment changed. When a clear cut does come along, you are usually transported to a completely different sphere of life on the boat, which is always jarring yet is part of the mechanism that keeps the film truly engaging throughout.
Most shots are extremely intimate, as the camera has no regard for personal space. It pushes in uncomfortably close to the fishermen’s faces and stays there, watching. It is literally left to languish on the deck with the dead or dying fish and is lowered down into the sea as it is passed between ships. Often, shots are upside down or so dark they are indecipherable, but this does not detract from the potency of the atmosphere; it creates it. Certain shots transcend their initial surface quality and take on a foreboding, almost frightening tension, partly due to the lack of a guiding voice, but also because of their length. In this way, LEVIATHAN stands with the QATSI trilogy in its meditative and engrossing stream-of-consciousness staring, albeit limited to the realm of commercial fishing.
If LEVIATHAN does have a thesis, it’s that documentary filmmaking needs neither narrative, identifiable characters or a clear message to engage an audience, as these things are discoverable without guidance.
Brad Franklin is a writer based in Los Angeles.
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