DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
In 2006, American filmmaker Lee Isaac Chung was in Rwanda at a relief mission teaching filmmaking to a group of Rwandan students. While there, the director ended up making his first feature, shot in just 11 days, and starring mostly local non-actors. His actors improvised much of their dialogue their native tongue, Kinyarwanda, making it the first narrative feature ever made in this Rwandan language. What’s most remarkable is that in working with his students on what was essentially a educational exercise, Chung managed to not only complete what would become his own first feature film, but a film that has been a massive critical success for such a modest little ultra-indie, winding up in the Une Certain Regard section of the Cannes Film Festival.
Munyurangabo tells the story of two young Rwandan boys, one Hutu, and one Tutsi, who set out on a trip from the big city of Kigali to the farm home of one of the boys. In this simple tale of two kids who probably don’t know they’re not supposed to be friends, Chung looks at the Rwandan genocide and conflict through a very small, highly specific lens, one that many critics have suggested examines the issues at hand with far greater sensitivity and subtlety than many of the bigger films on the same subject.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow through Tuesday at the AFI. Writer/Director Lee Isaac Chung will be in attendance at the Friday and Saturday screenings.
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This year’s South East Asian film festival at the Freer brings together six local premieres from six different nations: Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The festival screenings are spread out over three weekends during the course of the next month. The first two screen this weekend, on Friday and Sunday, respectively. Friday night’s festival opener is a Malaysian film noir spoof, When the Full Moon Rises, which sends up classic Malaysian films (some of which might be lost on U.S. audiences) and classic horror and mystery conventions (which should be more familiar to a local audience). Sunday’s program is A Month of Hungry Ghosts, a documentary on Singapore’s annual Hungry Ghost festival, a variation on similar festivals that happen throughout Asia during the seventh lunar month of the year, which is known as the “Ghost Month” (this year’s ends tomorrow).
Opens tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery’s Meyer Auditorium, and continues through the middle of October. See the full schedule here.
