DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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Dreileben Part 1: Beats Being Dead (Dreileben—Etwas besseres als den Tod). Courtesy the Goethe-InstitutWhat it is: A showcase for recent German-language films, now in its 20th year.
Why you want to see it: This year’s Film|Neu festival of new films from Germany, Austria and Switzerland opens Friday night with the East Coast premiere of Westwind, a coming of age tale of twins which takes place a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The program continues through next Thursday. Highlights include Stopped on Track (1/21 and 22), an inoperable-brain-tumor drama directed by festival favorite Andreas Dresen; Cracks in the Shell (1/21), a drama school coming of age picture that has been compared to Black Swan; the kidnapping thriller Bastard (1/21 and 22), directed by newcomer Carsten Unger, whose reputation as working “in the vein of “Roman Polanski and Michael Haneke” has a lot to live up to; and the crime trilogy Dreileben (1/22), about a murderer on the loose in a picturesque German town right out of the Sissi movies. Like 2010’s Red Riding Trilogy, the series was helmed by three different directors.
View a trailer for Dreileben
January 20-26 at E Street. See the Film|Neu website for details.
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What it is: A white man finds music and love among the Bayaka pygmies.
Why you want to see it: A tall, gangly ethnomusicologist (Kris Marshall, who looks like Steve Buscemi as ginger ectomorph) from New Jersey with a failing liver makes one more trip to Africa to document the songs of the Bayaka pygmies – and falls in love. Meanwhile, the Bantu mayor Bayaka (24’s Isaach de Bankole) equates progress with deforestation and sells out the land to a Chinese businessman (Will Yun Lee). The filmmakers take pains to distinguish this from your typical condescending “white man’s journey,” but it’s hard to parse out those race relations without feeling a little uncomfortable. Still, if the plot is diminished by the lush natural beauty of the land (photographed by Conrad W. Hall, son of legendary cinematographer Connie Hall), the land and her people are the true stars of the film, and provide the wonder and mystery that make it worth a look.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema. Director Lavinia Currier will appear at the 7:20 screenings Friday and Saturdya for a Q&A.
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So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come (David Gatten, 2010). Image courtesy of David Gatten.What it is: The work of an filmmaker who “explores the intersection of the printed word and the moving image in unusual ways.”
Why you want to see it: Historical documents and experimental film making may not seem like obvious candidates for BFF. But the films of David Gatten revel in this marriage of unlikely media. His Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts: Parts I – IV uses text and image to chronicle the fabled library of William Byrd II, much of which was later purchased by Thomas Jefferson, whose own library was the foundation of the Library of Congress. Gatten will be on hand to introduce this weekend’s screenings and take questions from the audience.
View a Hampshire College Lecture by David Gatten.
Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts: Parts I – IV screens Saturday, January 21 at 2:30 pm; Four Films toward Part V of Secret History of the Dividing Line, a True Account in Nine Parts screens January 21st at 4:30 pm; Silent Mountains, Singing Oceans, and Slivers of Time screens Sunday, January 22nd and 4:30 pm. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
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What is it: The past and future of horror (circa 1969) come together for a rough but effective fright.
Why you want to see it: It’s just your basic boy meets girl story. But in this case, girl (Carol White) has an abortion and marries another boy, only to be stalked by boy one (Paul Burke, later a fixture on prime time soaps). Roger Ebert, who knows his way around a bucket of exploitation, wrote that “on almost every level other than the ability to involve us and scare us, it’s not a very good movie.” But it’s that ability to scare that counts, and you’d expect no less from the film’s creative team, which represents diverging generations of horror. Director Mark Robson began his career under the tutelage of legendary producer Val Lewton, with The Seventh Victim and Bedlam, and his previous credit was 1967’s domestic horror Valley of the Dolls. Writer Larry Cohen went on to direct a slew of exploitation classics, and curiously returned to babies as the root of all evil in the It’s Alive series. Thanks to the Washington Psychotronic Film Society for showcasing this lesser-known terror.
View the trailer.
Monday January 23 at 8 at McFadden’s. Free.
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Also opening this week, the Iranian drama A Separation, which just won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
