DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
One of the hottest tickets of the SILVERDOCS film festival earlier this year was Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s moving documentary on Hurricane Katrina, which we reviewed in June. The buzz beforehand was that the pair had broken the mold in their look at the tragedy, giving viewers a rare look at things from the heart of the Ninth Ward as things unfolded. That look came via an extraordinary bit of amateur video taken by street hustler and aspiring rapper Kimberly Roberts, a unique and personal piece of filmmaking unfiltered by media analysis. But that footage was only the beginning of what Deal and Lessin managed to create.
After meeting Roberts and her husband by chance while engaged in a Katrina documentary with a different focus, the pair of filmmakers devoted their entire film to the couple. Through the course of the film, we return to the Roberts’ decimated neighborhood with them and then follow them to multiple relocations. Their struggle is never easy, but Deal and Lessin’s cameras never shy away from showing the couple’s lows along with their highs. This may be only one story out of thousands of similar ones in New Orleans, but the human impact of the disaster and utter failure of the government to respond adequately is made more clearly and more eloquently via this singular focus than any broad view could ever hope to convey.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow for one week only at E Street. The filmmakers will appear in person at tomorrow’s evening shows, and all through Saturday’s screenings.
—
If last week’s Fassbinder recommendation was a little on the daunting side, this week’s is a little more manageable. Kamikaze 1989 is not one of the filmmaker’s directorial efforts, but rather his final acting role. Director Wolf Gremm, who has done most of his work in German television, cast the workaholic director (as well as a number of actors from Fassbinder’s own films) in a near-future sci-fi noir about terrorist activity in a totalitarian state where the only entertainment comes from inane reality television series and all media is centrally controlled. Gremm’s remarkable scriptwriting prescience aside, the real attraction here is Fassbinder, quickly calling forth memories of Orson Welles in Touch of Evil with his turn as a corpulent, sweaty, scruffy police detective determined to track down the baddies. The star would die mere months after the film was shot, but of course, this being Fassbinder, that was plenty of time for him to finish two of his most highly regarded movies before he went. Rarely seen in the U.S., it’s a chance to see the this riveting personality on screen in the prime—and sadly, the end—of his career.
View clips from the movie.
Friday at 7 p.m. at the Library of Congress’ Mary Pickford Theater. Free.
