DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Albert Lamorisse’s fantastical 1956 short, The Red Balloon, remains a beloved and simple look at childhood friendship, imagination and joy, as well as the flip-side: the confusion and cruelty of childhood and the destructiveness of envy. Hou Hsiao-hsien’s 2007 film, The Flight of the Red Balloon, isn’t so much a feature-length remake as it is a loosely-inspired re-imagining, expanding the central metaphor of that film into a story all Hou’s own.
For this, the first European film from the Taiwanese director, Hou keeps the balloon and the boy, Simon. But he adds a more detailed story of the boy’s relationship with his mother — a performance artist developing a marionette show played with effervescent eccentricity by Juliette Binoche — and the young woman his mother hires to care for him while she works, who happens to be a Chinese film student remaking The Red Balloon. The naturalism of these relationships and the fantasy element of the balloon itself, relegated to a more supporting role here than in Lamorisse’s tale, layer and blend in unexpected and fascinating ways in this luminous, accessibly experimental tale.
View the trailer.
Tomorrow at 7 p.m. at the Freer Gallery‘s Meyer Auditorium. Free.
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Early this year, in my quest to see every Oscar-nominated film before the awards ceremony, I headed down to E Street to catch their screenings of the Live Action and Animated Shorts nominees. It was a Wednesday night, and these collections had already been playing there for a couple of weeks, so it never occurred to me to purchase advance tickets. Much to my surprise, there were no tickets left. D.C., it seems, loves short films, enough to sell out a program of shorts on a mid-week February evening, and enough to make the DC Shorts Film Festival one of the premiere film festivals in town, as well as one of the premiere festivals of its kind nationwide.
This year’s festival includes 97 films, none longer than 24 minutes, grouped into nine separate programs of about two hours each. Those programs will screen in rotation at E Street and the Navy Memorial over the course of the next week. The selections range from a dozen nations, as well as some picks from close to home. After all is said and done, the festival closes a week from tonight with collection of the best films of the festival, based both on the decisions of the festival jury as well as audience voting throughout the week.
And if you’re a filmmaker yourself, or would like to get into it, the festival offers a number of parties to network with other filmmakers, as well as seminars geared towards beginning and low-budget filmmakers. Short films are an excellent way to get started, and the festival is extremely supportive of anyone who enters: even if you don’t end up on the festival slate, you’ll still get plenty of feedback on improving your work.
View the festival promo.
Begins tonight and runs for the next week at E Street and the U.S. Navy Memorial Theater. Screenings are $12 each, and festival passes range from $30-$125. Purchase tickets here.
