Popcorn & Candy: Class Project
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
In 2006, American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung was in Rwanda at a relief mission teaching filmmaking to a group of Rwandan students. While there, the director ended up making his first feature, shot in just 11 days, and starring mostly local non-actors. His actors improvised much of their dialogue their native tongue, Kinyarwanda, making it the first narrative feature ever made in this Rwandan language. What's most remarkable is that in working with his students on what was essentially a educational exercise, Chung managed to not only complete what would become his own first feature film, but a film that has been a massive critical success for such a modest little ultra-indie, winding up in the Une Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.
Munyurangabo tells the story of two young Rwandan boys, one Hutu, and one Tutsi, who set out on a trip from the big city of Kigali to the farm home of one of the boys. In this simple tale of two kids who probably don't know they're not supposed to be friends, Chung looks at the Rwandan genocide and conflict through a very small, highly specific lens, one that many critics have suggested examines the issues at hand with far greater sensitivity and subtlety than many of the bigger films on the same subject.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow through Tuesday at the AFI. Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung will be in attendance at the Friday and Saturday screenings.
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This year's South East Asian film festival at the Freer brings together six local premieres from six different nations: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The festival screenings are spread out over three weekends during the course of the next month. The first two screen this weekend, on Friday and Sunday, respectively. Friday night's festival opener is a Malaysian film noir spoof, When the Full Moon Rises, which sends up classic Malaysian films (some of which might be lost on U.S. audiences) and classic horror and mystery conventions (which should be more familiar to a local audience). Sunday's program is A Month of Hungry Ghosts, a documentary on Singapore's annual Hungry Ghost festival, a variation on similar festivals that happen throughout Asia during the seventh lunar month of the year, which is known as the "Ghost Month" (this year's ends tomorrow).
Opens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium, and continues through the middle of October. See the full schedule here.
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The Second Annual Bootleg Festival
This year's 2nd Annual Bootleg Festival kicked off yesterday, and the festival has an excellent array of films on display through the weekend. Most programs include a number of short films and videos followed by a feature. Tonight's big title is Number One With a Bullet, a documentary focusing on gun violence in Hip Hop. Tomorrow's programs feature films on Hip Hop culture in Gaza and Ghana, while Saturday has another diverse lineup with a narrative feature about graffiti artists in San Francisco, a documentary on women in Hip Hop, and a documentary (Democracy in Dakar, pictured) about the intersection of Hip Hop and politics in Senegal.
Check the Boogleg Festival website for schedules, ticket, and pricing information.
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Ethiopian director Haile Gerima's ambitious, sprawling film takes place over the course of nearly twenty years from the early 1970s through the '80s, looking at one Ethiopian intellectual's journey away from, and back into, his homeland during the time of political and social tumult that followed the overthrow of Haile Selassie in 1974. Gerima's protagonist is a doctor who trained in Germany only to find the country he returns to is not the one that he left. The story is a familiar one for many African intellectuals who leave their countries for schooling, and Gerima's film has been extremely successful on the festival circuit, winning a number of awards for the director at the prestigious Venice Film Festival last year. The Avalon is the first theater in the United States to screen the film.
View the trailer.
Opens tonight with a special $30 premiere at the Avalon (tickets), with a normal theatrical run beginning tomorrow.
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Steven Soderbergh has been mightily prolific of late, as The Informant! represents his fourth feature released in the past 12 months. It also represents the director's most purely entertaining film since 2001's Ocean's Eleven. Soderbergh tells the story of Mark Whitacre, a divisional president for agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, who, in the early '90s, became one of the biggest corporate whistleblowers in history when he revealed a huge, international lysine price-fixing conspiracy led by ADM. Soderbergh could have turned the story into a sober piece about corporate malfeasance, but Whitacre's long and winding real-life story is so bizarre that Soderbergh and writer Scott Z. Burns (working from Kurt Eichenwald's non-fiction thriller) decided to make it into a dark, almost absurdist, comedy. The results are both hilarious and thought provoking. A pudgy Matt Damon shines in the lead role, turning in a brilliantly nuanced comedic performance, surrounded by an impressive crew of comic actors who are largely playing it straight.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Uptown, Georgetown, and a few theaters outside of town.