DCist’s subjective and selective guide to some of the most interesting films playing in town in the coming week, with a few 11th hour picks for tonight.

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Andy Warhol and Diana Vreeland (smoking).

Diana Vreeland: The Eye has to Travel

Slant Magazine said she “looked like Louise Bourgeois, but shared the inventive boldness of a René Magritte.” This forward-looking artist was not of the gallery scene but of the fashion world. Diana Vreeland served as tastemaker to such icons as Twiggy and Jackie Onasis. Director Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who married the fashion icon’s grandson, directed this warts-and-all look at a woman who overcame adversity to become a difficult boss, a distant mother, and an icon in her own right.

View the trailer.
Opens tomorrow at the Avalon and Angelika Mosaic.

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Eduardo Nunes’ Southwest

Brazilian Film Week

E Street’s sixth annual showcase features a mix of fiction and documentary features, two of the latter focusing on Brazilian music: The Samba Within Me (October 1 and 3) and Palavra (En)Cantada (Sept 29 and Oct 2-3). The most intriguing title on the program may be Eduardo Nunes’ debut feature Southwest (Sept 28-29 and Oct 4), a meditative study of a woman whose entire life passes in a single day. The movie was shot in 16mm b&w, but with Landmark’s recent and unfortunate switch to all-digital presentation we’ll have to settle for a digital approximation. Fans of Brazilian music may also want to report to Silver Spring this weekend for the AFI’s Latin American Festival, which screens the documentary Tropicália (Fri Sept 28 and Sunday Sept 30 at the AFI) .

View the trailer for Southwest.
September 28-Oct 4 at E Street Landmark Cinema. View the full schedule here (scroll past the calendar).

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Busong (Palawan Fate) (Courtesty of Auraeus Solito)

All Roads Film Festival

National Geographic hosts the eighth annual showcase of “contemporary stories by or about indigenous and under-represented minority cultures.” Highlights include documentaries that look at a South Dakota American Indian Reservation (Bridge the Gap to Pine Ridge, September 29) and a young woman who leaves her reclusive Samaritan sect to become an Israeli tv personality (Lone Samaritan, September 30); and the first dramatic feature from the indigenous Palawan community of the Philippines; (Busong (Palawan Fate), September 27).

View the festival trailer and a complete schedule here.
September 27-September 30 at National Geographic.

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Sylvia Schedelbauer’s “Sounding Glass,” part of the “Journeys” program.

Sonic Circuits

This festival of experimental music is now in its twelfth year, and features a sidebar of recent avant-garde films. “Found music, recycled music, collaborations with sound artists, experiments with the soundtrack, musique concrete, field recordings, acousmatic sound. What all the pieces have in common is the key element that sound plays in evoking these particular cinematic themes.”

View an excerpt from Paul Clipson’s “Sphinx on the Seine.”
Friday, September 28 in Lab 11 at 3:00 pm at the Atlas Performing Arts Center. Free.

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(Home Box Office)

Me @ The Zoo

Internet celebrity may be a more fickle master than the old fashioned kind. Chris Crocker’s 2007 YouTube performance, “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE” recalls Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant in its mascaraed hysteria, and racked up 44 million hits. But those numbers did not add up to mainstream success — this documentary about Crocker, made for HBO by Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch, is being screened at the Hirshhorn, after all.

View an interview with the directors.
Tonight, September 27 at 8:00 pm at the Hirshhorn. Free.

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John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963

Charles Guggenheim’s founded a film production company whose first product was a Steve McQueen feature. As a director, Guggenheim, who worked on the Robert F Kennedy campaign, trained his eye on another American icon. Commissioned for the dedication of the Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, this 1979 featurette “highlight[s] his humor, eloquence, leadership, and courage facing challenges at home and abroad.” Presented by The Charles Guggenheim Center for the Documentary Film at the National Archives, in anticipation of the October 12th opening of “Eavesdropping on History: JFK and the Cuban Missile Crisis – A 50thAnniversary Exhibit.” Historian Timothy Naftali will moderate a discussion after the film with Harris Wofford, JFK’s Special Assistant for Civil Rights, and film editor and Guggenheim collaborator Jay Lash Cassidy, who worked on the film and was a longtime friend and collaborator of Charles Guggenheim.

Tonight, September 27 at 7:00 pm in the William G. McGowan Theater at the National Archives, Constitution Avenue and 7th Street, NW. Free.

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Also opening this week, time travel by technology (Looper) and retrospection (The Perks of Being a Wallflower). We’ll have full reviews tomorrow.