A close-knit Swedish family is about to face a serious crisis in Ruben Östlund’s FORCE MAJEURE
FORCE MAJEURE (Ruben Östlund, 2014)
Lincoln Plaza Cinema, 1886 Broadway at 63rd St., 212-757-2280
Angelika Film Center, 18 West Houston St. at Mercer St., 212-995-2570
Opens Friday, October 24
www.magpictures.com
Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure is one of the best films you’ll ever hear. Not that Fredrik Wenzel’s photography of a lovely Savoie ski resort and Ola Fløttum’s bold, classical-based score aren’t stunning in their own right, but Kjetil Mørk, Rune Van Deurs, and Jesper Miller’s sound design makes every boot crunching on the snow, every buzzing electric toothbrush, every ski lift going up a mountain, every explosion setting off a controlled avalanche a character unto itself, heightening the tension (and black comedy) of this dark satire about a family dealing with a crisis. On the first day of their five-day French Alps vacation, workaholic Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) and his wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), are enjoying lunch on an outdoor veranda with their small children, Harry (Vincent Wettergren) and Vera (Clara Wettergren), when a potential tragedy comes barreling at them, but in the heat of the moment, while Ebba instantly seeks to protect the kids, Tomas runs for his life, leaving his family behind. After the event, which was not as bad as anticipated, the relationship among the four of them has forever changed, especially because Tomas will not own up to what happened. Even Harry and Vera (who are brother and sister in real life) know something went wrong that afternoon and are now terrified that their parents will divorce. But with Tomas unwilling to talk about his flight response, Ebba starts sharing the story with other couples, including their hirsute friend Mats (Kristofer Hivju) and his young girlfriend, Fanni (Fanni Metelius), who are soon arguing in private about what they would do in a similar situation.
There might be no going back in beautiful-looking and -sounding Swedish satire
Winner of the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival and the Swedish entry for the 2014 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Force Majeure is a blistering exploration of human nature, gender roles, and survival instinct. The often uncomfortable and utterly believable tale, inspired by a real-life event in which friends of Östlund’s were attacked by gunmen, recalls Julia Loktev’s The Loneliest Planet, in which an engaged couple encounter serious trouble and their immediate, individual reactions change their dynamic. Östlund (Play, Involuntary), who was also influenced by statistics that show that more men survive shipwrecks than women and children on a percentage basis, often keeps dialogue at a minimum, revealing the family’s growing predicament by repeating visuals with slight differences, from the way they sleep in the same bed to how they brush their teeth in front of a long mirror to the looks on their faces as they move along a motorized walkway in a tunnel at the ski resort. The ending feels forced and confusing, but everything leading up to that is simply dazzling, a treat for the senses that is impossible not to experience without wondering what you would do if danger suddenly threatened you and your loved ones.
From 1973 until her death in 2009, legendary dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch ran Tanztheater Wuppertal, the German company that changed the face of dance theater forever with such seminal productions as Rite of Spring, Café Müller, Danzón, Masurca Fogo, and so many others, many of which had their U.S. premieres at BAM. In 1978 she staged Kontakthof, collaborating with Rolf Borzik, Marion Cito, and Hans Pop, set to music by Juan Llossas, Charlie Chaplin, Anton Karas, Sibelius, and other composers. In 2000, she revisited the piece with a cast of senior citizens, and eight years later she turned the roles over to a group of Wuppertal high schoolers, most of whom had never heard of her and had never danced before. Director Anne Linsel and cinematographer Rainer Hoffmann follow the development of this very different production in Dancing Dreams, speaking with the eager, nervous participants, who talk openly and honestly about their hopes and desires, as well as with rehearsal directors Jo-Ann Endicott and Bénédicte Billet, who do not treat the teens with kid gloves but instead are trying to get them to reach deep inside of themselves and hold nothing back. When Bausch shows up to choose the final cast, telling the teenagers that she doesn’t bite, the tension mounts. Dancing Dreams is an intimate look at the creative process, about dedication and determination and what it takes to be an artist. It suffers at times from feeling too much like a reality television show, mixing American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance with the fictional Glee, but it also offers a last glimpse at Bausch, whose final interview is captured in the film. “You might think I’ve had enough of Kontakhtof,” she says at one point. “But every time it’s a new thing.” Dancing Dreams is screening October 27 at 7:30 in conjunction with the current production of 
In 1943, Polish-born lawyer Raphael Lemkin, determined to stop the mass atrocities that were being committed by governments around the world, came up with a name for what he was lobbying heavily to make an official crime recognized by the international community: genocide. In Watchers of the Sky, director and producer Edet Belzberg (Children Underground) explores Lemkin’s vision through the modern-day work of four people battling against the odds to end genocide and bring those responsible to justice. Inspired by Samantha Power’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Belzberg follows Chad field director Emmanuel Uwurukundo of the UN Refugee Agency as he tries to find humanity among the horrific suffering in Darfur after losing most of his family in Rwanda; Transylvania-born Benjamin Ferencz, the chief U.S. prosecutor in the Einsatzgruppen Case in Nuremberg who today continues to implore the UN to do something about the horrifying crimes of aggression being perpetrated by multiple countries; Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court whose job was to gather evidence to arrest and try Sudan leader Omar al-Bashir for war crimes; and Power, the U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations who uses Lemkin’s activism to attempt to end the inaction of the international community, which sits idly by as mass murder takes place right under its nose.