DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Repertory: D.C. Labor FilmFest
Strictly speaking, the D.C. Labor FilmFest isn’t a repertory festival, but with over half of their programming falling into that category, plus a dedicated retrospective to the great Ken Loach, we’ll go ahead and shoehorn it into the category this week. The festival is put on by the Washington Metro Council of the AFL-CIO and highlights films that focus on labor issues, which is a perfect fit for the filmmaking of Loach, long a champion of the working class through his gritty social dramas about the British worker. The festival’s retrospective on the director features eight of his films, including classics like Bread and Roses, Riff-Raff, and Poor Cow, as well as his excellent 2006 Palm d’Or winner on the genesis of the Irish Republican Army, The Wind That Shakes the Barley. But the real showpiece for the festival is scoring the U.S. premiere (tonight!) of Loach’s latest, It’s a Free World, a grim take on the plight of exploited migrant workers in Britain that should resonate pretty strongly in the U.S., and in the D.C. area in particular. As added incentive to make it out to the premiere, tonight’s opening night festivities benefit the D.C. Employment Justice Center. Other festival highlights include Mike Judge’s now cult-classic Office Space, the latest by Volker Schlöndorff, Strike, which examines the beginnings of the Polish Solidarity movement, along with a number of recent documentaries.
Runs October 11-17. Most programs at the AFI Silver Theatre, with other screenings at a number of other venues around town. See the schedule for times and locations. There are even some chances to play hooky from the office at lunchtime in there, and as Woody Allen expressed in Crimes and Misdemeanors, there are few pleasures greater than sneaking out of the office to catch a movie in the middle of the day.
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Indie: A Walk Into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory
Esther Robinson’s documentary about her 41-years-missing uncle was a hit at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, as well as in Berlin, where it picked up the best documentary prize. In 1966, Danny Williams walked out of the life and the Factory of Andy Warhol, and was never seen or heard from again. Stranger still is that he began fading from memory and history, becoming little more than a footnote when evidence suggests he might have been more of an important figure at the time. Robinson searches for clues to who her uncle really was, and with the intriguing mystery of his sudden disappearance comes a look at the nature of fame and how the past is continually re-shot through the lens of the present. And how that lens can distort the truth significantly. D.C. audiences have but one shot at seeing this on the big screen, as the Hirshhorn kicks off its fall film series tonight with a single screening of the film.
Playing tonight only at the Hirshhorn‘s Ring Auditorium at 8 p.m. Admission is free.
