Music legend Bezerra da Silva, the father of Gangsta Samba, is profiled in Márcia Derraik and Simplício Neto’s documentary STRAIGHT TO THE POINT at the Brazilian Film Festival at Tribeca Cinemas
BRAZILIAN FILM FESTIVAL
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
June 5-12
212-941-2001
www.tribecafilm.com
www.brazilianfilmfestival.com
The eighth annual Brazilian Film Festival takes place at Tribeca Cinemas June 5-12, featuring fifteen films that both celebrate and take a hard look at Brazil and its vibrant history and culture. Felipe Hirsch and Daniela Thomas’s SUNSTROKES portrays unrequited love, Fernana Tornaghi and Ricardo Bruno’s QUEEN OF BRAZIL follows a small-town boy’s attempt to become Miss Gay Brazil, Jorge Bodanzky’s WITHIN THE RIVER, AMONG THE TREES heads into the Alto Solimões region to bring photography workshops to the native people, and José Joffily’s BLUE EYES delves into the growing worldwide immigration problem and racial profiling. Throughout the festival, DJ Marcelo Brasil will be spinning tunes in the Lounge Inffinito, with the free June 12 closing night and awards show being held at SummerStage in Rumsey Playfield, with live music and more.
When we were kids, one of our friends delighted in telling us over and over the story of Cropsey, a supposedly invented child-murdering creep who threatened all children everywhere. (We still think of the monster every time we pass by the Cropsey Ave. exit on the Belt Parkway.) Directors Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio go in search of the real Cropsey in a fascinating documentary that brings to frightening life the scary urban legend. In 1987, Jennifer Schweiger, a thirteen-year-old girl with Down syndrome, disappeared in Staten Island not far from the abandoned Willowbrook Mental Institution, a horrific place where unheard-of abuses had been detailed by a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera fifteen years earlier. The community, led by such activists as Donna Cutugno, came together to try to find Jennifer’s body while the police focused on Andre Rand as the possible perpetrator. Rand refused to say anything as the cops also sought to link him to other area disappearances, including that of Holly Ann Hughes in 1981. Through archival news footage, recent interviews with many of the primary figures involved in the case, and attempts at a face-to-face meeting with Rand, codirectors Zeman and Brancaccio reveal a dark side of humanity that still has devastating effects on a tight-knit Staten Island neighborhood in desperate need of closure.
After hard-luck fisherman Syracuse (a decidedly unglamorous Colin Farrell) raises his net to find out he has caught a woman (Alicja Bachleda) from the bottom of the sea, his life takes a dramatic shift in Neil Jordan’s wonderful fairy tale, ONDINE. Syracuse, also known disaffectionately as Circus for his checkered past, resuscitates the beautiful woman, who appears to have lost her memory and later chooses the name Ondine, which means “little wave.” Syracuse brings Ondine fishing with him, and when she sings her strange, haunting song, he catches more lobster and salmon than he ever has before. But his wheelchair-bound daughter, Annie (Alison Barry), who needs a new kidney, thinks than Ondine might be more than just good luck; she believes that Ondine is a selkie, a supposedly mythological sea creature who can live on land for seven years before having to return to her watery home. But when a mysterious stranger suddenly shows up in town, everyone is forced to reevaluate their changing lives. Gorgeously shot by master cinematographer Christopher Doyle (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) in the coastal village of Castletownbere and along Poulin Harbor, ONDINE is a compelling story that easily could have turned into treacly melodrama but manages to keep surprising up to the very end. Farrell is excellent as the uneducated, simple, but lovable Syracuse who, when not fishing or taking his daughter to her weekly dialysis treatment, shares his tale with the town priest (Stephen Rea) in some very funny scenes. Jordan (MONA LISA, THE CRYING GAME), who has a house in Castletownbere, has made a fairy tale audiences can really believe in with ONDINE, which features a lush soundtrack by Sigur Rós’s Kjartan Sveinsson that accompanies the lush locations.
Agnès Jaoui directed, cowrote, and stars in this fabulously French film about literature, music, love, and loyalty. Lolita (newcomer Marilou Berry) is an overweight young woman with dreams of becoming an opera singer. However, people seem to take an interest in her only when they learn that her father, mean-spirited Etienne (cowriter Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui’s partner), is a famous novelist and publisher. Indeed, that is the case when her vocal coach, Sylvia (Jaoui), finally agrees to help Lolita’s singing group prepare for a special performance. Meanwhile, Etienne takes Sylvia’s husband, struggling novelist Pierre (Laurent Grevill), under his wing, even as he ignores his daughter’s calls for love. Berry is simply marvelous in her first major role, utterly charming and heartbreaking as she reaches out to her father, puts her faith in the wrong relationship, and battles to express herself in a smothering world of hangers-on, wanna-bes, and, if she looks hard enough, true love. There’s a reason this film was chosen to open the 2004 New York Film Festival. Don’t miss it.