Saturday night’s screening of Barry Levinson’s POLIWOOD documentary will be followed by a discussion with producers Tim Daly, Robin Bronk, and Robert E. Baruc
Tribeca Cinemas
54 Varick St. at Laight St.
Through March 27
212-941-2001
www.artivists.org
www.tribecacinemas.com
Combining art and activism, the Artivist Film Festival is “dedicated to addressing human rights, children’s advocacy, environmental preservation, and animal advocacy.” The seventh annual festival kicked off last night with a screening of Jamal Joseph’s PERCY SUTTON: A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS and HARLEM IS MUSIC and continues today with Brian Single’s CHILDREN OF WAR, about Ugandan children who have escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army, preceded by Linda Chavez’s THE ONE WAYZ, involving an immigrant family dealing with the father’s deportation to Mexico. Friday night also includes Brian Malone’s INTELLIGENT LIFE: CHANGE YOUR MIND, CHANGE YOUR WORLD and Taghreed Saadeh’s ROUGH CUT. The stars come out on Saturday night, featuring Barry Levinson’s POLIWOOD documentary, which examines the 2008 Democratic and Republican Conventions; the compilation film 8, with shorts by Gus Van Sant, Mira Nair, Gael Garcia Bernal, Gaspar Noel, Addis Ababa, Jane Campion, Jan Kounen, and Wim Wenders; Joyce Chopra’s New York-set GRAMERCY STORIES (followed by a discussion with Chopra); and Gerard Ungerman and Audrey Brohy’s BELONGING documentary about climate change, narrated by Dustin Hoffman. The Artivist Film Festival shows that the world needs a lot of help – and that each one of us can make a difference.
Park Chan-wook kicked off his revenge trilogy with SYMPATHY FOR MR. VENGEANCE (even though the second film, OLDBOY, was the first one released in the States), a creepy, quirky tale that lays low for quite a while before busting loose with a massive splattering of the old ultra-violence. After deaf-mute Ryu (Ha-kyun Shin) fails miserably in a desperate, ridiculous attempt to get his dying sister (Ji-eun Lim) a kidney, the recently laid-off Ryu is convinced by his anarchist girlfriend, Youngmin (Doo-na Bae), to kidnap the four-year-old daughter (Bo-bae Han) of Park (Kang-ho Song), the man who owned the factory that kicked him out. But when the plan goes awry, both Ryu and Park become obsessed with avenging their torn-apart lives. Although the first half of the film is too slow and heads off in too many directions, the second half brings everything together, chock full of the kind of violence promised by the title. The film is being screened as part of Korean Movie Night presented at Tribeca Cinemas by the Korean Cultural Service and Subway Cinema.
Named Best Debut Feature at the 2009 New York Asian Film Festival and winner of a Tiger Award at Rotterdam, Yang Ik-june’s BREATHLESS is an involving portrait of family hidden beneath a veil of blood and violence. Yang, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, also stars as Sang-hoon, a local gangster who goes out every day and does whatever is necessary to collect for his loan-shark boss, Man-sik (Jeong Man-sik). Dour, angry, and full of rage, Yang curses at and strikes his coworkers, cops, and strangers as well as the people who owe Man-sik money. Not one to make friends, he is soon hanging around with a high school girl, Yeon-hee (Kim Kkot-bi), who has taken a liking to him and his young nephew, Hyeong-in (Kim Hee-soo). Although they don’t know it, Yeon-hee and Sang-hoon are drawn to each other because of their difficult relationships with their fathers, both of whom are struggling to deal with different kinds of tragedy. Although Yang does try to pull at the heartstrings with some over-the-top melodrama near the end, BREATHLESS is well-paced study of family and friendship, following a bloody path to show the importance of blood. The free screening at Tribeca Cinemas will be followed by a Q&A with Yang, who mortgaged his house to make this low-budget picture.
