this week in film and television

FOR SAMA

Waad al-Kateab documents daily life under constant bombardment in Aleppo in For Sama

FOR SAMA (Waad al-Kateab & Edward Watts, 2019)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Friday, July 26
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
www.forsamafilm.com

“You’re the most beautiful thing in our life, but what a life I’ve brought you into. You didn’t choose this. Will you ever forgive me?” Waad al-Kateab asks in the extraordinary documentary For Sama. In 2012 during the Arab Spring, Waad, a marketing student at Aleppo University, joined the protests against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. She started taking photos and cell-phone video, then got a film camera as she became a citizen journalist, documenting the escalating conflict, trying to find moments of joy amid the brutal, senseless murders of innocent men, women, and children. She met and fell in love with heroic doctor Hamza al-Kateab, who was determined to keep his hospital running as the bombings got closer. Waad and Hamza got married, and on January 1, 2016, she gave birth to a healthy girl, Sama.

The film, directed by Waad (who also served as cinematographer and producer) and Edward Watts (Escape from ISIS), is a poignant, unflinching confession from mother to daughter, explaining in graphic detail what the families of Aleppo are going through as Russian and Syrian forces and Islamic extremists maintain a constant attack. “We never thought the world would let this happen,” Waad explains as the body count rises — which she intimately shows, not shying away from shots of bloodied victims being brought into the hospital, a pile of dead children, or a desperate attempt to save the life of a mother and a newborn after an emergency caesarean. “I keep filming. It gives me a reason to be here. It makes the nightmares feel worthwhile,” Waad says.

She captures bombings as they happen, films families huddled inside their homes while machine guns can be heard outside, talks to a child who says he wants to be an architect when he grows up so he can rebuild Aleppo. Because she is a woman, Waad gains access to other women that would not be available to a male filmmaker as they share their stories of love and despair. Waad and Hamza plant a lovely garden to bring color to the dank, brown and gray city. A snowfall covers the turmoil in a beautiful sheet of white. The pitter-patter of rain offers a brief respite. But everything eventually gets destroyed as Waad and Hamza struggle with the choice of leaving with Sama or staying to continue their critical roles in the rebellion, she depicting the personal, heart-wrenching images of war — in 2016, her Inside Aleppo reports aired on British television — he tending to the ever-increasing wounded. “The happiness you brought was laced with fear,” Waad tells Sama in voiceover narration. “Our new life with you felt so fragile, as the freedom we felt in Aleppo.” Winner of the Prix L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary at Cannes among other awards, For Sama opens at the Quad on July 26; on July 27, Waad, Hamza, and Watts will participate in Q&As with Nermeen Shaikh after the 4:45 show and with Tomris Laffly at the 7:00 screening.

ABBAS KIAROSTAMI: A RETROSPECTIVE

Abbas Kiarostami is subject of comprehensive retrospective at IFC, featuring three talks with Godfrey Cheshire

IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
July 26 – August 15
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com

“During Godfrey’s several visits to Iran throughout a decade, he formed a relationship with my father that I had rarely seen him having with other writers. I believe this is because of Godfrey’s ability to go beyond the surface, his unique views and interpretations,” Ahmad Kiarostami writes in the foreword to film critic Godfrey Cheshire’s latest book, Conversations with Kiarostami (Film Desk, July 29, $18). In the 1990s, Cheshire went to Iran on multiple occasions to interview writer-director Abbas Kiarostami, helping introduce the new Iranian cinema to the West. Cheshire will be at IFC Center for three special presentations during the fab festival “Abbas Kiarostami: A Retrospective,” a three-week series comprising virtually all of Kiarostami’s shorts and full-length works, from award-winning, well-known tales to rarely screened gems, many in 2K or 4K restorations. Among the films being shown are the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend’s House?, And Life Goes On, Through the Olive Trees), Palme d’Or winner Taste of Cherry, Silver Lion winner The Wind Will Carry Us, the early documentaries First Graders and Homework, and Kiarostami’s first two features, The Traveler and The Report.

Abbas Kiarostami retrospective will feature three special events with critic Godfrey Cheshire (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Abbas Kiarostami looks ever-so-cool at MoMA show in 2007 (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In his Criterion essay on Taste of Cherry, Cheshire writes, “In Abbas Kiarostami’s universe, it might be said, there are no things, only relations between things. Likewise, in his cinema: no films, only relations between films—and within them. And between them and us.” Cheshire will delve into those relations at a trio of talks, beginning July 27 at 7:10 with “Kiarostami and Koker,” focusing on the trilogy and showing Through the Olive Trees. On August 3 at 5:10, for “Unseen Kiarostami,” Cheshire will screen the 1976 comedy A Wedding Suit and talk about that film as well as such other early works as Bread and Alley, Experience, and Fellow Citizen. And on August 4 at 5:20, for “Cinema in Revolution,” Cheshire will be joined by film professor Jamsheed Akrami for a screening of the initially banned Case No. 1, Case No. 2 and a discussion. In his online bio of Kiarostami, Cheshire calls the auteur “the most acclaimed and influential of Iran’s major filmmakers” and notes how in the twenty-first century “Kiarostami broadened his creative focus, devoting more time to forms including photography, installation art, poetry, and teaching,” exemplified by his 2007 exhibition “Image Maker” at MoMA and MoMA PS1. Keep watching twi-ny for reviews of individual films during this must-see retrospective.

JAPAN CUTS: BLUE HOUR

Kiyoura (Shim Eun-Kyung) and Sunada (Kaho) wonder what’s next in Yuko Hakota’s Blue Hour

FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM: BLUE HOUR (BURU AWA NI BUTTOBASU) (ブルーアワーにぶっ飛ばす) (Yuko Hakota, 2019)
Japan Society
333 East 47th St. at First Ave.
Sunday, July 28, 8:00
Festival runs July 19-28
212-715-1258
www.japansociety.org

The Japan Cuts festival at Japan Society concludes July 28 with the North American premiere of Yuko Hakota’s beautiful, wistful Blue Hour. The movie is named after one of the two magic times of day, particularly for filmmakers: The golden hour occurs right after sunrise and before sunset, when the sky turns a warm, golden color, while the blue hour takes place right before sunrise and after sunset, when a colder, deep blue permeates. In the film, Kaho stars as Sunada, a television commercial director with a habit of making poor decisions in her life and career. She’s just turned thirty and wants to do more than produce ads but does not appear to be driven enough. She is married to a kindhearted man-child (Daichi Watanabe) but is having an affair with the married Togashi (Yusuke Santamaria). At a party, she drinks to excess, embarrassing herself in front of her crew. And she hasn’t been home to visit her family in several years. She seemingly could have it all, but she lacks ambition and often seems chilly and aloof to others. “I don’t like people who like me,” she says at one point. Later, she admits, “I don’t know what it’s like to be close.”

Sunada (Kaho) has trouble finding happiness in Blue Hour

When Sunada mentions to one of her only friends, the impulsive, unemployed, and very charming Kiyoura (Shim Eun-Kyung), that she is getting ready to go home to see her grandmother, Kiyo proclaims that she will drive them there right away, so they get into her car and away they go. We learn a lot about the two women on the road trip — although this is no Thelma and Louise — but even more when they arrive at Sunada’s family’s small farm in the boondocks, where her oddball brother, Sumio (Daisuke Kuroda), lives with their sweet mother (Kaho Minami) and eclectic father (Denden). Sunada looks like she would rather be anywhere else. As Sunada refuses to relate to her significantly un-Ozu-like clan, Kiyo fits right in, always seeking fun in whatever she does, the polar opposite of her friend.

Lovingly photographed in soft hues by Ryuto Kondo, Hakota’s debut is a moving and poignant tale of a woman who has, sadly, apparently given up too soon; she’s an unusual protagonist in that just as she says that she doesn’t like people who like her, she herself is difficult to like. It’s hard not to see her as emblematic of Japan’s current troubled younger generation, one noted for its failure to socialize, date, marry, get a job, or even leave the house. Former teen model Kaho (A Gentle Breeze in the Village, Our Little Sister) wonderfully captures the character’s ennui, while award-winning South Korean actress and former child star Shim (Happy Killers, Miss Granny) is radiant as the ever-positive Kiyo, who is in love with life no matter where it takes her. Blue Hour is a small gem, quirky and insightful, delicate and alluring. The screening will be followed by a Q&A with Hakota, Kaho, and Shim. Among the other films playing at Japan Cuts are Mitsuaki Iwago’s The Island of Cats, Hiroshi Okuyama’s Jesus, and Makoto Sasaki’s Night Cruising in addition to the free panel discussion “The Current State of Film Restoration in Japan” on July 26 at 4:30, which will examine the industry itself and the restoration of Kenji Mizoguchi’s masterpiece Ugetsu.

ROOFTOP FILMS / MoMA POPRALLY x STATEN ISLAND: SPLASH

poprally

Snug Harbor Cultural Center
1000 Richmond Terrace, Staten Island
Saturday, July 27, $10 (free for children sixteen and under), 7:00
www.rooftopfilms.com
snug-harbor.org
www.moma.org

With MoMA’s main digs in Midtown under renovation, the second summer PopRally is going across the river to Staten Island on July 27. Partnering with Rooftop Films, MoMA is holding the festivities at one of the city’s genuine treasures, Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden, for food, drink, music, film, and more. The main event is a 9:00 screening of Ron Howard’s classic 1984 comedy, Splash, starring Tom Hanks as Allen Bauer, a single guy who falls in love with a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who is being tracked by a scientist (Eugene Levy); John Candy is Hanks’s crazy brother. The evening will also include giveaways, trivia contests, music from DJ Tom of Maker Park Radio and the Gotham Easy Brass Band, beverages from Five Boroughs Brewing Co., and food from Staten Island vendors Ho’ Brah Tacos and Egger’s Ice Cream Parlor. Free shuttle bus service will be provided between Snug Harbor and the Staten Island Ferry terminal before and after the screening. Attendees are encouraged but not required to show up in aquatic costumes; you can bring a blanket (limited chairs will be available) that you can spread out on the South Meadow. Go early and check out the lovely Snug Harbor itself; admission is only five dollars and it’s open till five. PopRally will be traveling to the Bronx next.

“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS”

How the 1941 Odessa massacre has been remembered is the central focus of Radu Jude’s “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians”

“I DO NOT CARE IF WE GO DOWN IN HISTORY AS BARBARIANS” (ÎMI ESTE INDIFERENT DACĂ ÎN ISTORIE VOM INTRA CA BARBARI) (Radu Jude, 2018)
IFC Center
323 Sixth Ave. at West Third St.
Opens Friday, July 19
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
bigworldpictures.org

Romanian writer-director Radu Jude follows up his 2017 documentary, The Dead Nation, with “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians,” a bold, provocative fiction film with nonfiction elements that explores continuing anti-Semitism and bigotry in Romania, Eastern Europe, and the world. The title is taken from a statement made by Romanian military dictator Marshal Ion Antonescu to the Council of Ministers in the summer of 1941, just a few months before the Odessa massacre in which tens of thousands of Jews were killed by Romanian troops. The film is set in contemporary times, as theater director Mariana Marin (Ioana Iacob) is preparing for a live, one-time-only massacre reenactment in the town square. Marin is determined to show what really happened during those days, complete with brutal murders and hangings, but Constantin Movilă (theater director Alexandru Dabija), her connection with the local government, insists that she leave out the gruesome parts, that the show should be a celebration of Romanian heroes. She argues that it would not be fair to the nearly four hundred thousand Jews that were ethnically cleansed by the Romanian military, but he quibbles over what’s true and what the community wants to see. As the show approaches, Movilă threatens to cancel it while numerous actors complain about the negative aspects being depicted, displaying affection for “Uncle Hitler” and a lack of empathy for the exterminated Jews.

“I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” is like a post-Nouvelle Vague film, echoing elements of French cinema from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas and Arnaud Desplechin, with debates of texts by Isaac Babel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Joseph Goebbels, Nicolae Steinhardt, and others. But instead of becoming pedantic, the discussions serve to enlighten the arguments and define such characters as Movilă and, in particular, Marin, who not accidentally shares the same name with a Romanian poet who wrote, “Serene and bitter, I hurry across my native land / As if tomorrow had already been.” The entire film is seen from Marin’s determined point of view, whether she’s reading in bed with her lover, Ștefan (Șerban Pavlu), getting support from her lead actor, Traian (Alex Bogdan), and right-hand assistant, Oltea (Ilinca Manolache), or smoking and drinking in a bubbles-free bath. She’s mad at the state of the world and disgusted that people don’t want to know the truth of their history; she’s like the tank she insists she must have for the production — and like the tank, which has to stand still, Marin refuses to budge, understanding the difference between compromise and censorship.

In her first leading role, Iacob is mesmerizing throughout the film’s 140 minutes, giving a tour-de-force performance that lays it all out there as she portrays a bold and brash woman who won’t back down from her personal and professional desires; she’s so immersed in the part that at times you’ll think you’re watching a documentary, enhanced by cinematographer Marius Panduru’s wandering, unpredictable camera. Jude (Scarred Hearts, Aferim!) tackles such critical issues as governmental whitewashing of history, the public’s selective memory, and the definition of patriotism itself, a debate raging across America under the current administration as well as in other nations. Whether Marin gets to stage the show or not ends up being besides the point as the people around her reveal their biases and hatreds, something a play is not about to change. “I Do Not Care If We Go Down in History as Barbarians” is a necessary film, but it’s also a frightening one.

LUZ

Luz (Luana Velis) has a strange story to tell, told in a strange way, in debut feature by Tilman Singer

LUZ (Tilman Singer, 2018)
IFC Center, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn, Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg
Opens Friday, July 19
yellowveilpictures.com/luz

German director Tilman Singer’s feature film debut, Luz, is a mesmerizingly dark and moody psychothriller, a thickly atmospheric seventy-minute foray into the unknown. Made on an extremely low budget as his thesis project at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, the film is about — well, I’m not sure I really know what it’s about, but I also cannot stop thinking about it. The film, which takes place in the late 1980s/early 1990s, opens with a long shot of an office reception area and hallway. A man is working behind the desk when a young woman in a baseball cap walks in agonizingly slowly, buys a soda from a vending machine, and says to the man, “Is this how you wanna live your life? Is this seriously what you want?”

The next scene is set in a gloomy bar where Dr. Rossini (Jan Bluthardt), a psychologist who is being repeatedly paged, and a mysterious woman, Nora Vanderkurt (Julia Riedler), are the only ones drinking. She approaches him, takes a sniff of what appears to be coke, mixes some strange cocktails, and tells him about her girlfriend, who has jumped out of her taxi. He eventually answers his pager; two cops, Bertillon (Nadja Stübiger) and Olarte (Johannes Benecke), have called him in to help interrogate a young woman in a baseball cap who has had an accident in her cab. Her name is Luz (Luana Velis), and she is prone to scream out a unique and profane version of the Lord’s Prayer at any moment. After a few more bizarre moments, Dr. Rossini joins the cops in one of the strangest interrogations you’ll ever see, a brilliantly staged spectacle involving hypnosis, suggestion, and a genius use of sound and image as Luz relates exactly what happened to her, going back to a bizarre ritual held at her Catholic school when she was a girl. (Olarte’s reactions are particularly memorable.) “What you see is distorted,” Luz says at one point, and indeed, everything we see is distorted, and convoluted, and twisted, but all in a captivating way as Singer channels David Cronenberg, David Lynch, John Carpenter, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulgi, creating a wholly unpredictable work of gleeful madness that immerses you in a hypnotic, demonic labyrinth.

Luz was originally meant to be a thirty-minute short centered around the interrogation, which was filmed first, but writer-director-producer Singer kept expanding it, inspired initially by police sketch artists and then by tales of his wife’s experience in a Catholic girls school in Colombia. He admits that he is not one for scripts, but it doesn’t really matter in this case. Shooting on 16mm film completely indoors and often in claustrophobic spaces, cinematographer Paul Faltz employs a stark palette of muted colors with sparse camera movement, while composer Simon Waskow harkens back to 1970s horror with his ever-threatening score. There’s a theatrical quality to the look of the film — the eerie production design, reminiscent of Stranger Things and Assault on Precint 13, is by Dario Méndez Acosta, who is also one of the producers — as well as the acting. In fact, Singer trained as a theater actor, as did most of the cast; the long interrogation scene is set in a room with rows and rows of chairs, as if an empty theater. Luz opens July 19 at IFC Center, Alamo Drafthouse Downtown Brooklyn, and Nitehawk Cinema, where all the seats deserve to be filled.

BURT LANCASTER: ROBERT SIODMAK’S THE KILLERS / DON SIEGEL’S THE KILLERS

Burt Lancaster makes a killer film debut in classic 1946 noir from Robert Siodmak

THE KILLERS (Robert Siodmak, 1946)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
July 19–25
Series runs July 19 – August 15
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In 1950, Edmond O’Brien starred as auditor Frank Bigelow in Rudolph Maté’s classic noir D.O.A., a story told in flashback as Bigelow tries to figure out why someone has poisoned him. Four years earlier, O’Brien dealt with another kind of fatalism in Robert Siodmak’s The Killers, playing insurance agent Jim Reardon, who is investigating why a gas station attendant was brutally gunned down in his bed in suburban Brentwood, New Jersey. The film — which kicks off Film Forum’s four-week salute to Manhattan-born Hollywood star Burt Lancaster on July 19 in a new 4K restoration — opens with cold-hearted contract killers Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad) arriving in town, looking for the Swede (Lancaster), aka Pete Lund and Ole Andreson. They waltz into Henry’s Diner, giving orders and exchanging mean-spirited dialogue with no fears or worries. When Nick Adams (Phil Brown) warns the Swede that the men are coming to kill him, the former boxer knows there’s nothing he can do about it anymore; he’s tired of running, and he’s ready to meet his end.

It’s a shocking way to begin a movie; up to that point, it’s a faithful version of Ernest Hemingway’s short story, but the rest is the splendid invention of writers Richard Brooks, Anthony Veiller, and John Huston and producer Mark Hellinger. Reardon soon finds himself meeting with a series of gangsters as they relate, through flashbacks, a plot to rob a payroll, perpetrated by a motley crew that includes “Dum Dum” Clarke (Jack Lambert), “Blinky” Franklin (Jeff Corey), the Swede, and mastermind Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), along with Big Jim’s gun moll, femme fatale extraordinaire Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner). Reardon’s boss (Donald MacBride) wants him to forget about it, since it’s essentially about a meager $2,500 insurance claim, but Reardon is determined to find out what happened to a quarter million in cash, with the help of the Swede’s childhood friend, Lt. Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene).

Ava Gardner turns more than a few heads in The Killers

The Killers is an intense, passionate heist flick, structured like Citizen Kane, starting with a death and then putting everything together via interviews and flashbacks. Lancaster and Gardner are magnetic, he in his screen debut, she in the film that made her a star. Siodmak (The Dark Mirror, The Spiral Staircase) masterfully navigates the noir tropes, from Miklós Rózsa’s jazzy score, which jumps out from the opening credits, and Woody Bredell’s oft-angled black-and-white cinematography that maintains an ominous, shadowy sensibility throughout to deft characterizations and surprising plot twists. As it makes its way through the seven deadly sins, The Killers lives up to its fab billing as a “Raw! Rugged! Ruthless drama of a man who gambled — his luck — his love — his life for the treachery of a girl’s lips.”

Nominated for four Oscars, for Best Director, Best Film Editing (Arthur Hilton), Best Music, and Best Adapted Screenplay, The Killers, which was also made into a 1958 student short by Andrei Tarkovsky and a 1964 crime drama by Don Siegel starring Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Norman Fell, and Ronald Reagan, is screening July 19-25 at Film Forum; the Lancaster tribute continues through August 15 with such other Burt classics as Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success, Fred Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity, and Louis Malle’s Atlantic City in addition to such lesser-known movies as John Cassavetes’s A Child Is Waiting, Sidney Pollack’s The Scalphunters, and Norman Foster’s Kiss the Blood Off My Hands.

The future’s not so bright, but Clu Gulager and Lee Marvin still have to wear shades in remake of The Killers

THE KILLERS (Don Siegel, 1964)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, July 20 – Monday, July 22
212-727-8110
filmforum.org

In conjunction with the screening of the 1946 version of The Killers kicking off Film Forum’s four-week Burt Lancaster festival, the downtown institution is also presenting Don Siegel’s 1964 remake July 20-22. Siegel, who at one point was supposed to direct the 1946 original, sets this adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s 1927 short story in a bright, candy-colored world that is a far cry from the intricate, shadowy darkness of Robert Siodmak’s earlier noir version; in fact, it’s so luminous that hitmen Charlie Strom (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager) are often wearing dark sunglasses (à la Jake and Ellwood Blues), and the film opens with them walking into a home for the blind, passing by two blind boys playing their own version of cops and robbers. The men are there to kill former race-car driver Johnny North (John Cassavetes), who is now a teacher. Despite being warned by an old man (longtime character actor Burt Mustin) that they are coming, Johnny waits for them, choosing not to run. His lack of a survival instinct confounds Charlie, who goes on a search to find out why Johnny didn’t fight for his life but instead essentially welcomed a brutal death.

Ronald Reagan plays a villain for the first time in his last movie, Don Siegel’s 1964 version of The Killers

Johnny’s sordid tale is related to Charlie and Lee in flashback as they meet up with his mechanic and best friend, Earl Sylvester (Claude Akins); Johnny’s lover, femme fatale Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson); Farr’s other lover, crime boss Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan); and Jack’s flunky, Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell), as they tell a story of racing, double crosses, and a million-dollar heist. Written by Gene L. Coon and initially intended as a television movie but deemed too violent in the wake of the assassination of JFK and released theatrically, The Killers features plenty of cheesy scenes and none-too-subtle melodrama, but it’s still loads of fun, with a campy sense of humor lurking behind all the blood and guts, with a Rat Packy feel. Reagan is fun to watch in his final movie role before turning to politics — and his first time playing a villain — while the glamorous Dickinson shows off some fine hairdos and couture. Siegel, who had previously directed Invasion of the Body Snatchers and would go on to make Dirty Harry, Madigan, and Escape from Alcatraz, never veers off track as he relies on the great Lee Marvin, in the midst of a terrific run that included The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Cat Ballou, The Dirty Dozen, and Point Blank, to drive the action. It might not be very Hemingway-esque, but who cares?