Popcorn & Candy is DCist’s selective and subjective guide to some of the most interesting movies playing around town mostly at the AFI in the coming week.
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Guitarist Mdou Moctar (Courtesy the AFI)Rain the Color Blue with a Little Red In It
The AFI Silver’s New African Film Festival wraps up this weekend with a Nigerien music drama that is a loose retelling of Prince’s 1984 feature film Purple Rain. First time director Christopher Kirkley is the music archivist behind the great record label Sahel Sounds, which specializes in vinyl releases of contemporary African music like the compilation Music from Saharan Cellphones, which documents the kinds of West African musicians that consumers share and listen to on the 21st century equivalent of the transistor radio. Among those musicians is Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar, who stars as a version of himself, a talented guitarist whose father forbids him from playing music. Despite a font scheme taken directly from Purple Rain and a rival musician who’s essentially playing Morris Day, the most dramatic element of the movie, aside from Moctar’s excellent playing, may simply be the lifestyle of people who wander among a very different world. Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai, as the film is also known, is more neorealist meditation than pop melodrama, and is a must for fans of African music. Read more about the film here.
Watch a clip.
Friday, March 18 at 7:15 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Sujittraporn Wongsrikeaw and Jenjira Pongpas WidnerThe Environmental Film Festival continues this weekend with the area premiere of the latest exercise in slow cinema from Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Soldiers working on a secret excavation project are overcome by a sleeping sickness and are cared for in a makeshift hospital set up in a former schoolhouse. A middle-aged volunteer (Jenjira Pongpas) who communes with goddesses in human form learns that the hospital site happens to lie atop an ancient royal burial ground. Weerasethakul’s previous films, like the arthouse Bigfoot movie Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, have a habit of putting me to sleep, and his latest meditation is essentially just as boring. But since his subject this time is sleeping sickness, his film works its slow charm, with the help of lush photography and a calming sound design that lets you hear the tropical breeze. He even throws in what amount to potty humor and a dick joke. While obviously not for everybody, Cemetery of Splendour is a mesmerizing film that should be experienced on the big screen.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 20 at 8 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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Joan Fontaine and friendsThe AFI’s series William Cameron Menzies: Inventing Production Design continues this weekend with a 35mm print of this 1947 vehicle for Joan Fontaine, who, as the New York Times wrote in a contemporary review, “plays a monstrous female with a guile that is nothing short of frightening.” Set in London in 1909, this film noir follows Ivy as she ditches an impoverished husband played by Richard Ney (though with a character name like Jervis Hamilton Lexton, how poor can he be?) and a lover played by Patric Knowles for a wealthy bachelor played by Herbert Marshall. According to reports in the Los Angeles Times, director Sam Wood (veteran of a number of Marx Brothers classics) planned to use a then-new stream-of-consciousness approach for the film.
Sunday, March 20 at 11 a.m. and Monday, March 21 at 7 p.m. at the AFI Silver.
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(Courtesy of the Freer)Also screening in the Environmental Film Festival this weekend is this 2015 film from Japanese bad-boy director Sion Sono. His 2013 film Why Don’t You Play in Hell? was a hyperactive and unsuccessful pastiche that makes Quentin Tarantino look like a director of great subtlety, but his latest drama may be cut of more somber cloth. The Freer describes it as an “eccentric science fiction parable about humanity’s destructive effect on the environment. Megumi Kagurazaka plays Yoko, a humanoid interstellar delivery robot who runs on AA batteries and travels from planet to planet in a spaceship that looks like a Japanese bungalow. During her journey, she becomes curious about the packages she carries—especially the ones bound for Earth, where humans have become an endangered species.” The film gets its environmental resonance from its location shooting in zones evacuated after the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, and a cast made up on non-actors who lived in the tainted area.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 20 at 3 p.m. at the Warner Brothers Theater, American History Museum. Free.
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Denis Lavant and Chulpan KhamatovaThe Washington Psychotronic Film Society goes highbrow next week with a screening of this post-apocalyptic quasi-rom-com starring arthouse favorite Denis Lavant. But it would be easy to imagine an alternate universe where Lavant’s striking character-actor features make him an exploitation film icon. As the WPFS programmers describe it, “Anton [Lavant] is a lonely, unsophisticated, but hardworking dreamer who works at a dilapidated bathhouse and falls for one of its visitors, Eva (Chulpan Khamatova, Good Bye Lenin). When Eva’s father dies at the bathhouse, she blames Anton and runs off with his greedy older brother, who wants to tear down the bathhouse to make way for a real estate project. Can Anton win back Eva’s heart? Will he get the bathhouse through a rigorous inspection? Will anyone in the film ever speak a full sentence?”
Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 22 at Smoke and Barrel (note new location), 2471 18th St NW
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Also opening this week, the digital technology satire Creative Control. We’ll have a full review tomorrow.
