Los Angeles Film Festival 2011 Preview

CRITIC'S PICK  PAPER SOLDIER One of the most thought-provoking and visually sumptuous films to yet emerge from post-Soviet Russia, Alexey German Jr.'s meditation on the life of individuals caught up in the early-'60s cosmonaut program is at once a tribute to the past and a commentary on the present. Idealistic doctor Danya (played by the brooding Merab Ninidze) must choose the first person to undergo a space launch, a utopian project that increasingly threatens human cost. The film powerfully extrapolates Danya's internal bifurcation by emphasizing his romantic indecision, his dislocation in the barren Kazakh prairies of the launch site (where a Stalinist gulag is in the process of being dismantled), and the Chekhovian, farcical conversations that continually dance around the dread. It's a tribute to a generation of intellectuals and a country in transition, etched with astonishing long takes that echo the work of Tarkovsky and other Soviet and Eastern European filmmakers of the era. (D.C.)

GO  PARAISO FOR SALE The huge numbers of Americans and Canadians (mostly retirees) setting up shop in Latin American countries (where the dollar goes further, and where gorgeous landscapes can be bought for a song) has been well covered in the media. Director Anayansi Prado takes her camera to Panama to capture how the new immigrants, bringing wealth, arrogance and the determination to turn paradise into a grotesque resort, are literally and metaphorically bulldozing indigenous citizens. It's a captivating and infuriating film, a real-life horror flick as we watch smug American developers maneuver the law and taint local politics to achieve their goals. It's inspiring to see countless Panamanian would-be Davids standing up to assorted gringo Goliaths, but the slow-growing pessimism and cynicism of native citizens in the face of a clearly rigged system are depressing to witness. (E.H.) 

Family Instinct

Mysteries of Lisbon

Location Info

Map

L.A. LIVE

800 W. Olympic Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA 90015

Category: Community Venues

Region: Downtown

Photos

0 user reviews	Write A Review

Related Content

• The Worst of SXSW
  March 19, 2013
• How Easy Is It to Bang at SXSW?
  March 18, 2013
• The Biggest Sellouts at SXSW
  March 14, 2013
• The 50 Commandments of SXSW
  March 13, 2013
• The Best of SXSW
  March 19, 2013

More About

• Heather Courtney
• Chely Wright
• Plymouth Sundance
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media
• Film Festivals

GO  PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB This short, vérité-style narrative feature, directed by Mohsen Abdolvahab, consists of three loosely connected stories unfolding on a single day in contemporary Tehran. A game-show host tries to prevent his wife from going public about his domestic abuse; a cleric fields calls from the thief who stole his wallet; and an elderly couple attempt to prevent a suspicious repairman from entering their home. The tone throughout these public/private negotiations is unexpectedly neurotic-comic (the husband's defensive "jokes" about the history of wife beating feel like a bizarro-world Larry David rationalization routine), which allows Abdolvahab to breeze through a variety of Big Social Issues without lecturing or coming off as heavy-handed. (K.L.)

CRITIC'S PICK  POSITION AMONG THE STARS You don't need to have seen 2001's The Eye of the Day or 2005's Shape of the Moon to be moved and awed by the final leg in Dutch filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich's warmhearted doc trilogy involving the Sjamsuddin family from the chaotic slums of Jakarta. Rather than another weepy lament over the anesthetizing effects of Third World poverty, this patient but wildly expressionistic mosaic uses a canvas so vast that not just the subjects but fighting fish, cockroaches and the mangiest rat yet committed to cinema complete a bizarre ecosystem of co-dependence. There are no talking heads or voice-over, just acrobatic vérité camera work, allowing the rapidly changing details of this post-globalized society to be mirrored in the day-in-the-life toils of middle-aged slacker Bakti, his ball-busting Christian mother, Rumidjah, and his mildly Westernized young niece, Tari. (A.H.)

THE PRUITT-IGOE MYTH Directed by Chad Friedrichs, this documentary painstakingly illustrates how racism, classism and government agencies — all in the service of big business — shaped the horrors of St. Louis' notorious Pruitt-Igoe housing project, demolished in 1972 after being allowed to slide from a state-of-the-art planned community to a hellhole of violence and despair. Nothing revealed in the film is really news, though seeing it all carefully laid out on-screen by talking heads (social scientists, journalists, former residents of Pruitt-Igoe) is maddening, while old news and stock footage of the project is riveting. Given the ongoing shredding of the social safety net in America, the film's greatest service might be to remind us that programs and services for the poor have always had hostile enemies, and the assaults taking place now are nothing new. (E.H.)

SALAAM DUNK Basketball is an escape — from regressive gender roles and daily life in a nation torn from within and occupied by outsiders — in Salaam Dunk, David Fine's documentary chronicling a year in the life of the women's basketball team at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani. Though the subject is ripe for sentimental affectation, Fine's approach is commendably evenhanded. His focus is more on the inexperienced but determined young women at AUI-S than on the war-torn milieu that surrounds them. Having lived through displacement and tragedy, they treat the basketball court not as another battle zone but rather as a place of fellowship and unity. They're genuine exemplars of strength wrought by hardship. (M.N.)

GO  SAWDUST CITY Written, directed by and starring David Nordstrom (lead of LAFF '05 title Trona), Sawdust City begins with a gracefully ingenious montage, soundtracked by a phone call between Bob (Nordstrom) and his brother, Pete (Carl McLaughlin), establishing their relationship and situation: Bob's married and stuck in the dying lumber town in which they grew up, Pete's a drifter currently in the military, they're estranged, it's Thanksgiving, Pete's in town for one night and he wants to see their alcoholic father. The brothers hop bars all day and night, slowly dropping their masculine fronts and revealing long-buried resentments. Nordstrom demonstrates an uncanny feel for the shape and architecture of drunken misadventure, with James Laxton's digital cinematography carving a tangible mood out of smoke, steam and snow. But because the narrative premise is an obvious MacGuffin, there's nowhere for this to build but to a blowout marked by disappointingly generic dialogue ("I was running away from you!" "You were running away from yourself!"). Sawdust City is just good enough that you wish it were better. (K.L.)