Popcorn & Candy: It's Not Easy Being Green
DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
D.C. Environmental Film Festival
Every year the Environmental Film Festival, already by far the biggest film festival to hit D.C., seems to get even bigger. They've added another 15 films to their tally from last year, bringing the total for this year to a staggering 155, spread out over 56 venues. If there's a room in town with a projector and a screen, it's a safe bet they'll have a DCEFF film at some point over the next 10 days.
The first festival events actually got underway over a week ago, with a pre-festival daytime screening of What's on Your Plate to introduce one of this year's big themes, a series of food and agriculture-related films. The official start of the festival was two days ago, with a number of screenings, plus a lecture delivered by environmentalist Peter Mathiessen, who is the subject of a documentary profile that will screen Saturday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery.
Of potential interest to locally-focused audiences will be Nora!, a profile of local restaurateur Nora Pouillon, who's eponymous restaurant was the first certified organic eatery in the country, and The Green House, a documentary on the construction of the area's first carbon-neutral house, in McLean. The rest of the festival is filled with new films and older films, documentary and narrative features, a number of programs for children, plenty of local premieres, and award-winning films from other festivals.
View the welcome video, with Philippe Cousteau, on the festival home page.
Now playing at 56 venues around town, through March 28. See the full schedule for details.
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The world of Jacques Tati encompasses a scant six features and a handful of shorts, a remarkably limited output for a director who is held in such high regard, and whose career spanned over thirty years. One might argue that he was born into the wrong generation, as much as his films are informed by the physicality and visual stamp of silent films. Indeed, his greatest work, 1967's Playtime is almost entirely dialogue-free. But Tati wasn't just a Chaplin/Keatonesque revivalist: he was always innovating, and even when he wasn't using sound for dialogue, he was using the microphone just as artfully as he did the camera. Most Tati's films feature himself as the fish out of water character Monsieur Hulot, a man constantly out of step with modern society. The AFI's retrospective covers all of Tati's features, as well as a program of three of his shorts, starting tomorrow with Tati's second feature, and the first of the Hulot films, M. Hulot's Holiday, in a newly restored print that will play throughout the next week. There is also crossover between this series and the Environmental Film Festival: the three films generally regarded as the director's best are all about the environmental impact of the modern world, as Hulot is confronted with pollution of all kinds, from air to sound to the visual clutter of the modern landscape.
View the trailer for M. Hulot's Holiday.
Opens tomorrow at the AFI, and runs through March 28.
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Milarepa: Magician, Murderer, Saint
To go along with their recently-opened "In the Realm of the Buddha" exhibit, the Freer & Sackler galleries will also be showing a number of Buddhist-themed films in the coming weeks, starting with this Tibetan film about one of the most well-known of Tibetan Buddhist yogis, Milarepa. The film was directed by Neten Chokling, himself a Buddhist lama, and an actor in one of the best known Tibetan films, 1999's The Cup. In this, his first movie as a writer and director, he tells the story of the angry and vengeful early years in the life of the mystic, during the late 11th century. Chokling intends this to be the first installment in a trilogy about Milarepa's life.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery's Meyer Auditorium. Free.
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The latest film from director John Boorman (Deliverance) is this 2006 Irish indie, which stars Brendan Gleeson as a successful property developer who is stalked by...himself. At least that's who he thinks the mysterious double of himself is coming to kill him. Is it real, or just a figment of his overstressed imagination as he tries to put through a tough deal to build a massive stadium? Kim Cattrall also stars as Gleeson's wife. This film is being presented by Solas Nua's "Irish Popcorn" series, which features free screenings of a contemporary Irish films every month.
View the trailer.
Monday at 7 p.m. at the Flashpoint Gallery. Free.
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Also opening tomorrow is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Niels Arden Oplev's adaptation of Stieg Larsson's best-selling novel about an odd couple detective pairing of a middle aged journalist and a young cyberpunk girl, as they try to solve the disappearance of a teenage girl some forty years prior. We'll have a full-length review tomorrow, as it opens at E Street, Bethesda Row, and Cinema Arts.