DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
Juliette Binoche in Abbas Kiarostami’s ‘Certified Copy’.AFI European Union Film Showcase
Tonight is the kickoff of the AFI and the European Commission Delegation’s annual European Union Film Showcase. The festival, now in its 23rd year, collects some of the best European films from the previous year’s festival circuit, often screening some of the biggest and best foreign films of the year before they get theatrical distribution. This makes the festival a great opportunity to get a sneak peek at these films before they are released in the U.S. This year’s festival screens 40 films from 27 countries.
Some highlights: The opening night presentation is Illegal, the official 2010 Oscar selection from Belgium, about an illegal Russian immigrant in Belgium who is separated from her son when she is arrested. There are three centerpiece screenings throughout the festival, including The Hedgehog, Mona Achache’s award-winning adaptation of French novelist Muriel Barbery’s bestseller, and the first film made outside of Iran by that country’s foremost filmmaker, Abbas Kiarostami, Certified Copy, which won Juliette Binoche a Best Actress Award at Cannes earlier this year. The closing night selection is Copacabana, a French comedy which stars Isabelle Huppert as a free-spirited mother who must try to act a little more normal, lest her embarrassed daughter leave her off the guest list for the daughter’s wedding.
View the trailer for Certified Copy.
Opens tonight at the AFI and runs through November 23. Individual screening tickets are $10, festival passes that will get you into as many screenings as you can manage run $145. See the festival guide for full descriptions and schedule.
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The European Showcase is just one of three festivals getting underway this week. Alexandria has one of their own starting tonight and running through the weekend, with screenings at a half dozen venues throughout the city. They’ve got nearly 40 films on their schedule, most of them premieres. The programming is pretty broad, with both documentary and narrative selections, foreign and domestic, shorts and features, live action and animation. This is a juried festival, so it will conclude with an awards ceremony on Sunday, with awards going to both jury and audience selections. Highlights among tonight’s opening night are Ride the Divide (D.C. premiere), a visually-striking documentary about a 2,700-mile bike race through the length of the Rockies, and Griefwalker, a documentary about Stephen Jenkinson, a palliative care educator who travels throughout Canada providing grief counseling.
Opens tonight and runs through Sunday at six venues around Alexandria. See the schedule for complete listings.
