DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
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To Make A Farm (March 14). Courtesy Orange Road Pictures Ltd.2012 Environmental Film Festival
What it is: Two weeks of diverse programming to advance “environmental understanding through the power of film.”
Why you want to see it: With 180 titles in a range of genres from documentary to fiction to animated and experimental works, there is something for everyone at this sprawling festival, celebrating it’s 20th anniversary this year. Festival centerpieces include a retrospective of the work of Lucy Walker (The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom, Saturday, March 17 at the AFI) and a sneak preview of Ken Burns’s new work The Dust Bowl (Sunday, March 25 at the National Archives). Highlights also include Olaf Eliasson: Space is Process, a documentay about the Danish-Icelandic artist; the Washington premiere of The Hunter (Saturday, March 24 at the AFI), starring Willem Dafoe as a “mercenary scientist” determined to track down the last Tasmanian Tiger; and two titles in the AFI’s Nicholas Ray series: Wind Across the Everglades (Saturday, March 24 at the AFI), starring Burl Ives as a ginger-haired Florida poacher and recent Oscar winner Christopher Plummer as his naturalist foe, and The Savage Innocents (Sunday, March 25 at the AFI), starring Anthony Quinn as an Eskimo in the movie that inspired Bob Dylan to write “The Mighty Quinn.” Download the complete festival program here.
View the trailer for The Hunter.
March 13-25 at venues around town. Check the festival website for details.
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Sihle Dlaminin and Jayashree Basavaraj in Lucky (Thursday March 8 and Sunday March 11)What it is: The AFI hosts the 8th annual festival celebrating the films from across the African continent.
Why you want to see it: Co-presented by the AFI, TransAfrica and afrikafé, New African Films 2012 packs a baker’s dozen of titles into six days. Documentaries include Mama Africa (Thursday, March 8 and Monday, March 12), about legendary singer Miriam Makeba; Lionel Rogosin’s 1959 film Come Back, Africa (Friday, March 9), which documents life under Apartheid; Born on the 25th of January (Saturday, March 10), a look at the beginnings of the revolution in Tahrir Square; and No More Selections! We Want Elections! (Sunday, March 11) , about the 2005 Liberian election in which the nation’s first woman president was chosen over a soccer star. Fiction features include a look at the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide (Grey Matter, Friday, March 9), a romantic drama about the rise and fall of South African teen actor Muntu Ndebele (A Million Colors, Saturday, March 10), the neo-noir How to Steal 2 Million (Saturday, March 10), and a psychological thriller from Morocco (Pegasus, Tuesday, March 13).
View the trailer for How to Steal 2 Million .
Thursday March 8 – Tuesday, March 13 at the AFI. See the AFI’s website for a full schedule.
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Claude Laydu in Diary of Country Priest. © Union Générale CinématographiqueWhat it is: The National Gallery’s Robert Bresson series continues.
Why you want to see it: If you missed the AFI’s screening of Bresson’s early masterpiece last spring, here’s your chance to see it for free. Last year I wrote
Bresson famously schooled his actors to read their lines without inflection — a trick cult director Monte Hellman tried on James Taylor in the existentialist road movie masterpiece Two Lane Blacktop. Though his actors (whom he called “models”) are forbidden to emote, such reticence is more powerful than standard melodramatic acting. Bresson sums up his cinematic philosophy in Notes of a Cinematographer: “… not beautiful images, but necessary images.” If this all seems a bit punishing, the patient moviegoer is rewarded with what some consider a religious experience — but whatever tenets you hold dear, Diary is as pure as cinema gets. This adaptation of a novel by George Bernanos (whom Bresson would tap again for the even starker Mouchette [screening at the Gallery next weekend]) weaves the profound out of the pedestrian, significance and awe out of out of “the most insignificant secrets of a life lacking any trace of mystery.” It’s the perfect introduction to one of the most challenging and influential masters of cinema.
Also at the Gallery this weekend, Bresson’s 1945 feature, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, about an untrusting woman who tests her lover’s faithfulness by luring him into a seedy relationship. With dialogue by Jean Cocteau.
View the trailer for Diary of a Country Priest.
Diary of a Country Priest screens Sunday, March 11 at 4:30. Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne screens Sautrday, March 10 at 4:30. At the National Gallery of Art. Free.
What it is:The bedroom mysteries of Korea, solved.
Why you want to see it: Officials crack down on sexual morals in what seems to be a prim and proper neighborhood in Seoul. But what happens in the bedrooms of even the most mild-mannered citizens may surprise you. Intended for mature audiences. Part of the Freer’s Korean Film Festival DC 2012: The Art of the Moving Image from Korea, held in conjunction with the AFI.
View the foxy trailer.
Sunday, March 11 at 2:00 pm at the Freer. Free.
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What it is: A vision of heaven and hell that is peculiarly Brazilian and Psychotronic.
Why you want to see it: Jack and Chico accidentally poison a dog, and talk a priest into giving man’s best friend a funeral. The concept seems simple and Bunuellian enough, but the friends find themselves amid stylish devils, hosts of angels, gangsters, and for good measure, a carnival. Released in 2000, the movie has a literary pedigree one rarely finds at the Washington Psychotronic Film Society. It was adapted from a 1955 play by Ariano Suassuna inspired by both Moliere and the Brazilian Catholic baroque. This box-office smash in Brazil sounds like what might happen if Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo) made a comedy about the afterlife.
View the trailer (in Portugese with no subtitles).
Monday, March 12 at 8:00 pm at McFadden’s. Free.
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Also opening this week: the unfunny, unromantic romcom Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, and The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, a documentary about an infamous public housing project. We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.
