DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Director Chuyen Bui Thac’s ‘Adrift’, which opens the “Hanoi on Film” series tomorrow.It’s officially autumn, which means that the number of film festivals and specialized series in this town skyrockets, and your opportunity to see non-multiplex films increases by a huge margin. In fact, this week Popcorn & Candy’s five main picks abandon traditional cinemas entirely. And, even better, most of them are either free or super cheap.
Starting over at the Freer, this weekend features a three-film series about the past and present of the Vietnamese city of Hanoi. To accomplish that, they’ve picked an interesting trio of films. One, Adrift, is set in the present, and is a steamy, erotically-charged tale of a young newlywed driven to climb into beds other than her own. The second, Little Girl of Hanoi tells the story of a young girl wandering the rubble of a recently bombed Hanoi in 1974, searching for her father, a soldier. Director Hai Ninh didn’t need to build sets of a destroyed city, as he filmed after the city had just been actually bombed. For American audiences well-versed in the dozens of Vietnam-era movies made by Hollywood, this rarely seen film should be an interesting take from the other side. That film will be followed by a panel discussion featuring scholars, a journalist and one of America’s greatest living film critics, Jonathan Rosenbaum. Last on the list is The Guava House, a film with a modern setting, but about a man who is stuck in the past: his mental development was stunted decades ago by a fall from a Guava tree.
Friday evening, Saturday and Sunday afternoon, at the Freer Gallery. See the schedule at the Smithsonian website. Free.
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Tuesday night, National Geographic kicked off its annual All Roads Film Festival, which is dedicated to showcasing “breakthrough film and photography from indigenous and underrepresented minority cultures around the globe.” There’s still 13 films left on this year’s festival calendar, which runs through the weekend. The slate also includes a photography exhibit in the National Geographic lobby outside the Grosvenor Theater and a Bhangra dance party on Saturday night. The festival includes two U.S. premieres (Desert Flower, tonight at 7 p.m., and Samson & Delilah, Saturday at 7 p.m.), plus a number of films by filmmakers working with seed money from the All Roads Film Project. Saturday afternoon also features a Māori Film Retrospective, a tribute to native Māori filmmaker Merati Mita, the first woman from New Zealand to make a feature film.
Currently in progress at National Geographic, with screenings through Sunday at their Grosvenor Auditorium. Festival passes are no longer available, but single tickets to individual screenings are avaible for $10 each. See the schedule for a full rundown of films and showtimes, and to purchase tickets.
