this week in film and television

BROOKLYN FILM FESTIVAL: A CAMBODIAN SPRING

Boeung Kak resident Toul Srey Pov leads the fight to save her community in A Cambodian Spring

A CAMBODIAN SPRING (Chris Kelly, 2017)
Wythe Hotel
80 Wythe Ave. at North Eleventh St.
Wednesday, June 7, 7:30, and Sunday, June 11, 8:30
Festival continues through June 11
www.brooklynfilmfestival.org
acambodianspring.com

It would be easy to assume that Chris Kelly’s documentary A Cambodian Spring, about a Phnom Penh community’s battle to save its village when developers move in, was part of the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival, which begins June 9 at Lincoln Center and IFC Center. However, it is actually being shown June 7 and 11 at the Wythe Hotel in the twentieth annual Brooklyn Film Festival, which began June 2 and continues through June 11. Winner of the Special Jury Prize for International Feature Documentary at the Hot Docs International Documentary Festival, A Cambodian Spring follows two women and one man as they lead the fight to protect their homes in Boeung Kak after Prime Minister Hun Sen cancels the World Bank’s Land Management program and makes a deal with Shukaku Inc. to develop the area. The new plan is based on eliminating the large lake around which many people live, struggling to survive day to day. Leading the charge against the land grab are Tep Vanny, a born activist; Toul Srey Pov, a quiet mother who suddenly finds herself thrust into the spotlight, rallying supporters using a megaphone; and the venerable Luon Sovath, a Buddhist monk and video activist whose pagoda threatens to defrock him if he doesn’t back off challenging the government. “They said that a monk shouldn’t care about the problems of the people,” he says, referring to the other members of his pagoda, “but I disagree.” The people of Boeung Kak are mired in abject poverty; their livelihood, fishing, has been taken away from them, and now Shukaku workers have shown up with equipment ready to tear down the decrepit shacks the villagers call home. “Soon, all the poor people will be gone. Only the rich will be left,” Pov says. When self-exiled opposition party leader Sam Rainsy returns to Cambodia to run against Hun Sen, the citizenry finds new hope, but then infighting threatens their cause. “If we have unity, compassion, and trust, then we will be strong and no one will break us,” Pov explains. “But if we don’t trust each other, then how can we work together? It will all come to an end. We won’t succeed.”

Socially conscious writer-director Kelly spent nine years preparing, filming, and editing A Cambodian Spring, capturing Sovath’s long walk to the courthouse, the Shukaku workers flooding villagers’ homes while emptying the lake, and press conferences with a nervous Pov. It’s a one-sided affair that doesn’t even pretend to be objective, and at two hours, it is too long, with several repetitive scenes that serve as overkill in order to pull at viewers’ heartstrings and paint a clear line between good and evil, no matter how valid and factual it may be. That said, Kelly, who is currently at work on a documentary about slavery in the Thai fishing industry, has revealed a frightening, tragic situation, and one that is occurring all over the world. Governments make deals with corporations, leaving the poorest, most powerless of their citizens abandoned, with little food and shelter. But the story is just as much about the three protagonists, inspirational figures who decided they could not remain silent as their lives and those of their neighbors were turned upside down. “Our mouths are sealed with tape and stitched together with thread,” Pov says, but they refuse to stop fighting. All three risk their freedom and safety, but Sovath often stands out, a gentle giant in monk’s robes who can’t exactly blend in with the crowds. A documentary that will anger you and make you want to rise up yourself, A Cambodian Spring is screening June 7 at 7:30 and June 11 at 8:30 at the Brooklyn Film Festival, with Kelly participating in Q&As after both shows. The festival continues through June 11 with more than 130 narrative, documentary, animated, and experimental features and shorts and a twentieth-anniversary party at the Williamsburg Music Center.

SAMI BLOOD

Elle-Marja (Lene Cecilia Sparrok) gets treated like an animal in Amanda Kernell’s Sami Blood

SAMI BLOOD (SAMEBLOD) (Amanda Kernell, 2016)
Landmark Sunshine Cinema
143 East Houston St. between First & Second Aves.
Opens Friday, June 2
212-330-8182
www.levelk.dk
www.landmarktheatres.com

Inspired by her Sami heritage, Amanda Kernell’s debut feature is a poignant and moving tale of racism, identity, and ethnocentricity in 1930s Sweden. The film begins in contemporary times, as Elle-Marja (Maj-Doris Rimpi) returns to her childhood community for the funeral of her sister. Elle-Marja’s son, Olle (Olle Sarri), and granddaughter, Sanna (Anne Biret Somby), delight in the folk ways of the Sami, but the scouring, elderly woman left her village when she was fourteen and never wanted to come back. “I have no business there with those people,” she says, as if she is not one of them. She resents the language, the traditional clothing, the ritual marking of the reindeer calfs, the yoiking (a form of yodeling) — everything she escaped from. The film soon flashes back to the 1930s, when the young Elle-Marja (Lene Cecilia Sparrok), her little sister, Njenna (Mia Sparrok), and their mother (Katarina Blind) live as nomadic reindeer herders. The girls are sent off to a boarding school where Sami children are taught to speak only in Swedish and the local kids degrade them, referring to them as “filthy Lapps.” Their teacher, Christina Lajler (Hanna Alström), is stern, viciously whacking them across the fingers when they are out of line. Elle-Marja reaches her breaking point when anthropologists Emanuel Wennerberg (Anders Berg) and Hedda Nordström (Beata Cavallin) come to school to measure and photograph the naked girls, treating them like animals. Elle-Marja dreams of living a more fulfilling life, shedding her Sami skin, and she thinks she might have found what she was looking for in Niklas (Julius Fleischanderl), a cultured young Swedish man a few years older than her, but getting away is not going to be that easy for her.

Sami Blood explores brutal treatment of Sami children in Sweden

Winner of numerous awards at multiple festivals around the world, Sami Blood is anchored by a breakout performance by first-time actor, and real-life Sami, Lene Cecilia Sparrok, whose sister, Mia, plays Njenna. Lene’s expressive eyes reveal fear and longing, sadness and anger. After getting caught running afoul of the unspoken rules, she is chastised by Christina. “Has Elle-Marja got anything to say?” the teacher asks. Lene first stares blankly ahead at nothing, then turns defiantly to the right, refusing to answer or to even look her in the eye. She wants to learn about the world, and her teacher knows that but, believing the Sami to be racially inferior, teacher refuses to nurture student; it is no mere coincidence that the non-Sami name Lene chooses for herself is Christina. Meanwhile, Kristian Eidnes Andersen’s brooding, ominous score hovers in the background as cinematographers Sophia Olsson and Petrus Sjövik slowly scan the rural landscape, where only darkness and danger await Elle-Marja. It’s a powerful film that relates directly to the world’s treatment of “the other” in the twenty-first century, particularly in regard to refugees, immigrants, and such movements as “America first,” which show disregard for both indigenous and foreign cultures. Bookended by the scenes of the older Christina, which were initially made for Kernell’s 2015 short, Stoerre Vaerie, and partly based on the experiences of her grandmother, Sami Blood is a meditation on the persistence of pain and how time and distance do not necessarily heal the physical and psychological wounds of childhood.

PRIDE MONTH: QUEER CONTINUUMS

Taja Lindley will give a free preview of Bag Lady Manifesta at the Brooklyn Museum on June 3

Brooklyn Museum
200 Eastern Parkway at Washington St.
Saturday, June 3, free, 5:00 – 11:00
212-864-5400
www.brooklynmuseum.org

The Brooklyn Museum honors LGBTQ Pride Month for the June edition of its free First Saturday program, which continues its 2017 theme, “A Year of Yes: Reimagining Feminism.” There will be live music from the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus, SassyBlack, and Tamar-kali; a curator tour of “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85” led by Rujeko Hockley; teen apprentice pop-up gallery talks on works by LGBTQ artists; the New York City Legacy Ball, featuring Icons, Legends, Statements, and Stars of the ballroom community, hosted by father Sydney UltraOmni; a Community Resource Fair with the Gender Empowerment Movement Program, Health and Education Alternatives for Teens, Brooklyn Zen Center, Diaspora Community Services, Percent for Green, Well Read Black Girl, Brooklyn Pride, and the Audre Lorde Project; Pop-Up Poetry with Saretta Morgan and Alysia Harris paying tribute to artists in “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85”; a preview performance by Taja Lindley from The Bag Lady Manifesta, which comes to Dixon Place in the fall; a crown-making workshop; the Brooklyn premiere of Mike Mosallam’s Breaking Fast, part of “DisOrient: Queer Arab Film and Discussion,” hosted by Tarab NYC; and the kickoff of the museum’s Black Queer Brooklyn on Film series, with D’hana Perry performing selections from her immersive, multimedia documentary Loose and new works by Frances Bodomo, Dyani Douze, Ja’Tovia Gary, and Chanelle Aponte Pearson of the New Negress Film Society, joined by artists Lindsay Catherine Harris and Isabella Reyes and actor Ash Tai, followed by a Q&A. In addition, you can check out such exhibits as “Iggy Pop Life Class by Jeremy Deller,” “Infinite Blue,” “A Woman’s Afterlife: Gender Transformation in Ancient Egypt,” “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85,” and, at a discounted admission price of $12, “Georgia O’Keefe: Living Modern.”

FILMS ON THE GREEN: POTICHE (TROPHY WIFE)

Catherine Deneuve wants to be more than just a trophy housewife in François Ozon’s Potiche

POTICHE (TROPHY WIFE) (François Ozon, 2010)
Central Park, Cedar Hill
East side from 76th to 79th Sts.
Friday, June 2, free, 8:30
www.musicboxfilms.com/potiche
frenchculture.org

For the tenth anniversary season of Films on the Green, presented annually in parks around the city by the French Embassy — Cultural Services, the selections were made by a collection of guest curators; the 2017 summer series kicks off June 2 with François Ozon’s Potiche (Trophy Wife), which was chosen by actress and comedian Wanda Sykes. Legendary French star Catherine Deneuve radiates a colorful glow throughout the film, her smile lighting up the screen as it has throughout her long career, which now comprises more than one hundred movies over more than fifty years. Reunited with writer-director Ozon (8 Women) and Gérard Depardieu (they first appeared together in Claude Berri’s Je Vous Aime in 1980 and more recently in André Téchiné’s Les Temps Qui Changent in 2004), Deneuve was nominated for a César for her role as Suzanne Pujol, a trophy housewife who primarily serves as arm candy for her husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), who runs Suzanne’s family’s umbrella factory like a tyrant and is a little too close to his secretary, Nadège (César nominee Karin Viard). When Robert is taken hostage during a nasty strike at the plant, Suzanne is forced into action, deciding to run the business with the help of her counterculture son, Laurent (Jérémie Rénier), and her conservative daughter, Joëlle (Judith Godrèche). At first clashing with the mayor, Maurice Babin (Depardieu), Suzanne is soon considering rekindling her long-ago affair with the rather rotund Maurice as she realizes there’s so much more to life than being a wealthy appendage.

Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) has her hands full in Potiche, which kicks off Films on the Green’s tenth anniversary season on June 2 in Central Park

Loosely adapted from a Theatre de Boulevard comedy by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Grédy, Potiche is a charming throwback to 1970s female-empowerment movies, depicting long-held-back women suddenly grabbing the reins and embracing their personal and professional freedom, getting out from under the thumb of repressive societal conventions. Ozon infuses the film with numerous references to Deneuve’s history, evoking such seminal works as The Young Girls of Rochefort, Belle de Jour, and, of course, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, and the costumes — particularly Deneuve’s fabulous fashion sense, which often dominates the scene — are a hoot, earning costume designer Pascaline Chavanne a much-deserved César nomination, but things get haywire in the final section, getting too silly and going too far over the top when politics come into play. Still, Potiche ably represents its genre, having fun with itself, which rubs off on the audience, who will have plenty of fun as well. Films on the Green continues weekly through July 28 (before a September 7 finale) with such other French films as Alain Gomis’s Tey (Today) chosen by Saul Williams, Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang selected by Wes Anderson, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt picked by Jim Jarmusch, and Marcel Carné’s Port of Shadows from Laurie Anderson.

MODERN MATINEES — MR. CARY GRANT: ARSENIC AND OLD LACE

Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre star in Arsenic and Old Lace

Cary Grant, Raymond Massey, and Peter Lorre star in Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (Frank Capra, 1944)
MoMA Film, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, May 31, free with museum admission, 1:30
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

MoMA’s eight-week tribute to one of Hollywood’s coolest cats, “Modern Matinees: Mr. Cary Grant,” concludes May 31 with the film in which the actor born Archibald Leach believed he gave his “worst performance,” Frank Capra’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Grant, in a role meant for Bob Hope (and offered to Ronald Reagan and Jack Benny as well), stars as Mortimer Brewster, an affirmed bachelor and theater critic who has fallen in love with the preacher’s daughter, Elaine Harper (Priscilla Lane), who lives in the house next to the one where Mortimer grew up with his brother, Jonathan (Raymond Massey), who ultimately went bad and has not been seen for many years. Ominously, separating the two Brooklyn houses is a small graveyard. Mortimer and Elaine get married, and they arrive at his childhood home to celebrate with the two aunts who raised him, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), a pair of ever-so-kind spinsters who also happen to be poisoning old men and having Mortimer’s other brother, Teddy (John Alexander), who thinks he’s President Theodore Roosevelt, bury them in the basement, where he’s building the Panama Canal. Jonathan, on the lam from the law, shows up that night with his plastic surgeon, Dr. Herman Einstein (Peter Lorre), who keeps stitching him new faces; the latest makes him look like Boris Karloff, as several people notice. (Karloff played the role on Broadway, but his contract prevented him from leaving the stage to make the movie, which was filmed in 1941 but not released until 1944, when Joseph Kesselring’s play ended its successful run. Adair, Alexander, and Hull were all in the play but were allowed to take time off to make the film.) Meanwhile, Officer Patrick O’Hara (Jack Carson), the new cop on the beat, keeps hanging around, but he’s not exactly clued in to what is going on right under his nose.

Arsenic and Old Lace concludes MoMA tribute to Cary Grant

“I was embarrassed doing it. I overplayed the character. It was a dreadful job for me,” Grant said of his performance in Arsenic and Old Lace, which turned out to be a very popular film. It’s hard to tell, as his comic timing makes for some very funny scenes, complete with pratfalls, making faces directly into the camera, and even channeling the Three Stooges at one point. Capra and screenwriters Julius J. Epstein and Philip G. Epstein take some cheap shots at Brooklyn, including Dodgers fans, but it’s best to just not pay attention to those opening scenes and wait for Grant and Lane to show up. Most of the film, which takes place over the course of one Halloween, is set in the Brewster family home, where cinematographer Sol Polito (I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Petrified Forest) keeps things dark and musty. Longtime stage actresses Hull, who would go on to win an Oscar for Harvey, and Adair (The Naked City, Detective Story) are charming and delightful as the most unlikely of serial killers, while Massey (Abe Lincoln in Illinois, East of Eden) is pure evil as Jonathan, and Lorre (M, Casablanca) is as creepy as always as the weird Dr. Einstein; Lorre would later star in Jacques Tourneur’s 1963 spoof The Comedy of Terrors with Karloff. Character actor Alexander is very loud as Teddy, who regularly runs up the stairs screaming, “Charge!” And despite his misgivings, Grant, who donated his full salary to war-related charities, is fine as Mortimer, blending comedy, horror, and romance with a sly wink. The film grows more and more convoluted as more people get involved, including James Gleason (Here Comes Mr. Jordan, The Clock) as Lt. Rooney, Edward Everett Horton (Lost Horizon, The Front Page) as Mr. Witherspoon, and Grant Mitchell (The Man Who Came to Dinner, Father Is a Prince) as Rev. Harper, and the endless gag of the cabdriver (Garry Owen) waiting outside gets old quick. But this is Capra, after all, so you have to take the good with the bad. And you’ll think twice the next time someone offers you elderberry wine.

CinéSalon: ENIGMATIC EMMANUELLE DEVOS (with Emmanuelle Devos in person)

Emmanuelle Devos will be at FIAF for a Q&A following the 7:30 screening of Read My Lips on June 6

French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, June 6 – July 25, $14, 4:00 & 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org

FIAF got quite a curator for its eight-week, eight-film CinéSalon series “Enigmatic Emmanuelle Devos”: beloved award-winning French actress Emmanuelle Devos herself. And to kick off the festival, which runs Tuesday nights from June 6 through July 25, Devos will be in Florence Gould Hall to present Jacques Audiard’s 2001 thriller, Sur mes lèvres (“Read My Lips”), for which Devos won the first of her two Césars as Best Actress. The film, which also stars Vincent Cassel, will be shown at 4:00 and 7:30 on June 6, with the later screening followed by a Q&A with Devos, who turned fifty-three earlier this month. The series continues with seven other films selected by Devos: Sophie Fillières’s Gentille, Arnaud Desplechin’s Kings and Queen and My Sex Life . . . or How I Got into an Argument, Jérôme Bonnell’s Just a Sigh, Lorraine Lévy’s The Other Son, Anne Le Ny’s Those Who Remain, and Martin Provost’s Violette. Devos, who has appeared in more than forty films during her twenty-six-year career, also received César nominations for Kings and Queen, The Adversary, and My Sex Life . . . as well as winning a second César for In the Beginning.

THE SURVIVALIST

Martin McCann stars as a man who will do just about anything to survive in Stephen Fingleton’s gripping debut feature

THE SURVIVALIST (Stephen Fingleton, 2015)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
www.facebook.com/thesurvivalistfilm

Stephen Fingleton’s debut feature, The Survivalist, arrived at Tribeca in 2015 with the kind of expectations that are, well, tough to survive. The script was on both the 2012 Hollywood Black List (tied for fourteenth) and the 2013 Brit List (number one) of best unproduced screenplays; the self-taught Fingleton has been included in various names-to-watch, stars-of-tomorrow lists; and his twenty-three-minute SLR was shortlisted for an Oscar. Despite all the buildup, The Survivalist lives up to its billing as a gripping dystopian thriller from a major new talent. In the indeterminate near-future, oil production has plummeted while population growth exploded, leaving very little food available. Deep in the forest, an unnamed man (Martin McCann) lives by himself, fiercely defending his small cabin and vegetable garden. He is part Mad Max, part Rambo, setting traps to catch animals and protect him from other humans who might threaten his self-sufficient existence. But when the stoic Kathryn (Olwen Fouéré) and her teenage daughter, Milja (Mia Goth), show up, asking for temporary food and shelter — and willing to offer an alluring trade for them — the survivalist ultimately decides to let them into his carefully organized private world, knowing that things could change drastically at any moment.

Stephen Fingleton and Martin McCann talk things over on the set of THE SURVIVALIST

The Survivalist opens with long scenes of no dialogue or music at all, just naturalistic soundscapes, setting the stage for an intense, powerful experience. The Northern Ireland forest is like a character unto itself, living, breathing, fraught with menace. Fingleton and cinematographer Damien Elliott zoom in extra close on the man’s eye lashes, as if each individual hair were fighting for existence as well. McCann (Shadow Dancer, Clash of the Titans) combines danger with tenderness when he softly caresses a photograph of a woman or makes soup for Kathryn and Milja, his eyes ever-alert, revealing someone who is still trying to hold on to his last vestiges of humanity. Theater veteran Fouéré and young actress Goth are superb as a mother-and-daughter team desperate to make it through the apocalypse. The relationship among the three protagonists evokes Don Siegel’s underrated 1971 Civil War drama The Beguiled, in which Clint Eastwood plays a wounded soldier being tended to in a girls boarding school, only taking place here in the future instead of in the past. Despite knowing better, you’ll want to root for all three of them to triumph in this horrific ticking-time-bomb of a world, which might be a whole lot closer than we think. Fingleton also made a well-received short prequel of sorts, Magpie, which establishes the fiercely taught mood of the feature film but is best watched afterward.