Karthik Subbaraj’s JIGARTHANDA opens the eleventh South Asian International Film Festival this week
SAIFF 2014
SVA Theatre, AMC Loews 19th St., Carlton Hotel, Joe’s Pub
November 18-23, $15-$125
www.saiff.org
The eleventh edition of the South Asian International Film Festival, which was founded by Shilen Amin to present works from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal and from within the Indian Diaspora, takes place November 18-23, consisting of eight feature films, four shorts, after-parties, receptions, and live music. The opening-night selection, X., is one of several festival films dealing with the art of the movies themselves, made by eleven Indian directors sharing in telling the story of a filmmaker by exploring his sexual past. In Karthik Subbaraj’s Jigarthanda (Cold Heart), a young director tries to make a reality gangster flick (Subbaraj will participate in a Q&A following the November 21 world premiere screening at the SVA Theatre), while a Bollywood writer heads to Hollywood in the centerpiece world premiere of Raj Nidimoru and Krishna D.K.’s Happy Ending. Other films include Shrihari Sathe’s Ek Hazarachi Note, Kanu Behl’s Titli, and Nabeel Qureshi’s closing-night, Karachi-set Na Maloom Afraad, which will also be followed by a Q&A. Wednesday night’s after-party at Joe’s Pub will be highlighted by a live performance by Raveena Aurora, while filmgoers are invited to mingle with the filmmakers at the closing-night cocktail reception on Sunday.
Charlotte Rampling is divine in François Ozon’s playfully creepy mystery about a popular British crime novelist taking a break from the big city (London) to recapture her muse at her publisher’s French villa, only to be interrupted by the publisher’s hot-to-trot teenage daughter. Rampling stars as Sarah Morton, a fiftysomething novelist who is jealous of the attention being poured on young writer Terry Long (Sebastian Harcombe) by her longtime publisher, John Bosload (Game of Thrones’s Charles Dance). John sends Sarah off to his elegant country house, where she sets out to complete her next Inspector Dorwell novel in peace and quiet. But the prim and proper — and rather bitter and cynical — Sarah’s working vacation is soon intruded upon by Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), John’s teenage daughter, who likes walking around topless and living life to the fullest, clearly enjoying how Sarah looks at her and judges her. “You’re just a frustrated English writer who writes about dirty things but never does them,” Julie says, and soon Sarah is reevaluating the choices she’s made in her own life. Rampling, who mixes sexuality with a heart-wrenching vulnerability like no other actress (see The Night Porter, The Verdict, and Heading South), more than holds her own as the primpy old maid in the shadow of a young beauty, even tossing in some of nudity to show that she still has it. (Rampling has also posed nude in her sixties in a series of photographs by Juergen Teller alongside twentysomething model Raquel Zimmerman, so such “competition” is nothing to her.) 
In 1924, two British men, among the most famous mountaineers of their time, George Mallory and Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, set out with a large team to climb to the summit of Everest. Their amazing journey was documented by Captain John Noel, who used a hand-cranked camera with an impressive telephoto lens and sent the footage via yak to a lab in Darjeeling to be developed. The resulting black-and-white film, The Epic of Everest, is a poetic document of the third attempt to scale Everest, a mountain the Tibetans called “Chomo-Lung-Ma,” or Goddess Mother of the World. The eighty-seven-minute silent film has been digitally restored by the British Film Institute in a beautiful version that is making its New York premiere November 14 at the Rubin Museum, where it will be shown more than a dozen times through December 21, with most screenings introduced by a special guest and some followed by Q&As. The Epic of Everest, which is also ethnographically important for its (at times ethnocentric) depiction of local Tibetan culture, includes several scenes of Mount Everest tinted in blue, red, and violet; the ice-blue Fairyland section is especially breathtaking. Meanwhile, the restored intertitles display such dramatic text as “There is nowhere here any trace of life or man. It is a glimpse into a world that knows him not. Grand, solemn, unutterably lonely, the Rongbuk Glacier of Everest reveals itself.” and “Nor can one wonder at the invention that has clothed this extraordinary peak with a sacred character. What a terrifying thing it is! What an immensity of size, height and power it possesses!”
After many years away from the homestead, Harry Collings (first-time-director Peter Fonda) returns to his farm, only to find that his wife (Verna Bloom) has kept herself rather busy once she assumed he was not coming back, in The Hired Hand, a so-called hippie Western written by Scottish novelist Alan Sharp, who also wrote Ulzana’s Raid and Night Moves. Warren Oates is his usual fine self as Harry’s dedicated sidekick, Arch Harris, as they do battle with the likes of the evil McVey (Severn Darden). The quiet, beautiful Fonda is like a Zen cowboy, trusting in karma to right the world’s wrongs, but that doesn’t always work out. Fonda considers the film, photographed by a young Vilmos Szigmond (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Deer Hunter), to be a Greek tragedy within a Western; indeed, it’s a little gem that that goes way beyond the trappings of the genre, laying the groundwork for such later anti-Westerns as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. The film is being shown November 14 as part of the Rubin Museum Cabaret Cinema series “My Formative Years,” curated by artist Francesco Clemente in conjunction with his current solo show, “Inspired by India,” and will be introduced by playwright Neil LaBute. Clemente says about the film, “I’m in favor of psychedelia in all manifestations and to find psychedelia in a Western is always nice when it happens, but it never happens.” The film series continues with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain on November 21 and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom on November 28 (introduced by choreographer Karole Armitage), before concluding with Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA on December 5.
Brooklyn-based documentarian Andrea B. Scott reveals the soft underbelly of contemporary America in Florence, Arizona, which is having its world premiere this week at the annual DOC NYC festival. Scott heads to the small desert town of Florence in the Grand Canyon State, an area that was a farm community until a nearby 1875 silver boom led to its becoming a more wild West kind of place. Today the town revolves around the prison system; there are twice as many prisoners in Florence as there are residents, and a call to privatize more of the jails is part of the battle for mayor between the New Age-y Lina Austin and former police chief Tom Rankin, both of whom speak openly and honestly with Scott. Scott, who directed, produced, coedited, and photographed the film — which includes gorgeous shots of sunrises and vast landscapes — also meets with prison barber and former inmate Andy Celaya, who remembers the respect ex-cons used to get after serving their time; another former prisoner, young Marcus Seitz, who can’t wait to turn twenty-one so he can work inside the prison, explaining, “That would be pretty cool”; and grizzled prison detention officer Gunny Jackson, who runs the Semper Fi Ranch with his wife, Lois, and considers himself a “dove” who can be “a very vicious man when I want to be; I know how to inflict pain.” Scott also visits the Pinal County Historical Society, which features a section on all of the people who have been executed in Florence’s prisons.