DCist’s highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week.
After the high-intensity movie-watching of December neared its end and I began assembling my best of 2010 post, the film I most regretted not being able to see before putting that list together was this film from Mexico, the first narrative feature from director Pedro González-Rubio. It had received raves from its time on the festival circuit, and could be found on a number of the less U.S.-centric top 10 lists, hailed by its fans as a beautifully shot and carefully nuanced look at the forging of a bond between a father and a son.
The father in the film is a young man of Mayan descent whose Italian wife has decided to take their five-year-old son back to Rome with her, now that their relationship has come to an end. Faced with the fact that it will likely be years before he ever sees his son again, he takes him out to sea for a few days to teach him the survival fishing methods of his ancestors. The twist is that the actors playing father, mother and son are exactly that in real life, and the story put onscreen is a version of their real story. While the film contains many real elements — and while González-Rubio is a documentarian, unlike a number of other filmmakers that straddled the line between fact and fiction in 2010 — he’s not pretending this is anything other than narrative. Even so, his observations of a father teaching his son to fish, knowing it will be their last time together for a long time, can’t help but reflect the reality of the situation, a combination that seems to contribute to how poignant most people find the resulting film to be.
View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at West End Cinema.
—
Russian Docs & Italian Neorealists
The National Gallery is also kicking off two series this weekend that seek to maintain close bonds with reality. The first is a series of Russian documentaries, each produced within the past 20 years, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The focus of the series, called “Stories from a Russian Province”, is to look at films that show life in specific localities around Russia, told by filmmakers with strong personal ties to the areas their films depict. This weekend has two programs, with a pair of films in each, covering subjects including a single mother’s struggle to raise nine children on her own, remote Siberian villagers having their pictures taken for new passports, furloughed miners hunting reindeer and Russians vacationing on the Black Sea. Vitaly Mansky, one of the three directors of that last one, Vacation in November, will be present for a Q&A after that film’s screening on Sunday at 5 p.m.
Also getting underway this weekend is the museum’s two-month-long retrospective of Italian neorealist cinema between 1941-1954, including films from many of the usual suspects of the movement: Visconti, De Sica and Rosselini. This weekend there is just one title, Days of Glory, from a number of directors including Visconti, which is less realism, and rather just real. The film, shot over two years during the occupation of Italy by the Germans from 1943-45, details the experiences of the Italian people during that occupation.
Starting this weekend at the National Gallery of Art with two films from the Russian program and one from the neorealists. Check the NGA site for the schedule. Free.
