Last year’s festival was supposed to be the last, but fate was snatched from the jaws of underfunding, and they’re back for their 29th year. I’ve complained about the unimaginative programming of recent festivals, which seem to be based on the same tired themes every year. But there’s always something good at the fest, and most of the films I chose to preview are worth catching.
Via Filmfest DC.
Be Known: The Mystery of Kahil El’Zabar
Director Dwayne Johnson-Cochran’s portrait of his long time friend Kahil El’Zabar begins uncritically, spelling out his subject’s considerable accomplishments as a jazz percussionist. The film’s technical flaws are immediately apparent, the production compromised by wildly inconsistent camerawork and sound. As Johnson-Cochran documents El’Zabar’s 2005 tour (including a stop at Takoma Park’s Sangha Cafe), the film’s shortcomings slowly give way to its strength. El’Zabar trusts the director so much that he reveals himself as few documentary subjects have before. You see the volatile performer and his bandmates say terrible things about the women he plans to take on tour; you hear about the children he fathered by different women; you hear about the U.S. Marshalls who interrupt one performance, pursuing him for unpaid child support. The movie is a visual mess, but it’s a thoroughly candid and unflattering portrait of an intense, uncompromising artist who happens to be a volatile and highly flawed human being. Which makes an intriguing corollary to the music: virtuosos aren’t always the ones who get at the truth.
Watch the trailer
Saturday, April 18 at 6:30 p.m. and Sunday, April 19 at 8:30 p.m. at the Goethe-Institut. Director Dwayne Johnson-Cochran will be interviewed by Skype at each screening.
Via Filmfest DC.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk: The Case of the Three Sided Dream
Rahsaan Roland Kirk (1935-1977) lost his sight as an infant when a nurse used silver nitrate drops in his eyes. His blindness gave him visions that he interpreted with music in which he would play three instruments at a time. How can a documentary about this strange and talented figure be anything less than fascinating? A deathly dry talking head format is how. Director Adam Kahan, in his first feature, elicits oddly unengaged conversation from Kirk’s friends and family, including trombonist Steve Turre. But it’s as if Kahan is somehow unaware of the colorful if sometimes off-color (cf. Be Known) anecdotes that jazz musicians are full of. There’s fantastic footage of Kirk playing Charles Mingus’ incendiary “Haitian Fight Song” on the Ed Sullivan show with a band that includes Mingus and Archie Shepp, but the quality of this footage makes me even angrier that this documentary about a subject so full of life is so bereft of it.
Watch the trailer.
Thursday, April 23 at 8:30 p.m. and Friday, April 24 at 6:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema
Via Filmfest DC.
Marie (Ane Dahl Torp) is a Norwegian scientist working at the bureau of weights and measures, and plans to do her papa proud by representing her country in Paris for a symposium on the kilo. But when life doesn’t measure up, she has to learn to get down. Director Bent Hamer (who’s come a long way from adapting Bukowski with Matt Dillon in 2005’s Factotum) turns a dry subject into a dryly comic film, its precise compositions gently falling out of symmetry when life falls out of balance. Because of course, the real measurement is love. 1001 Grams is the kind of cute little movie that Filmfest DC specializes in, and it’s just fine if you like precise photography and calibrated measurements.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 17 at 6:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema and Wednesday, April 22 at 8:30 p.m. at AMC Mazza Gallerie.
Via Filmfest DC.
Detective Ko (Sun-kyun Lee) is driving to his mother’s funeral when he turns to avoid hitting a dog. Then he hits a human. Instead of coming clean, he puts the body in his trunk, setting off a complicated and darkly funny crime drama. Lee’s guilt-ridden reactions throughout the film should give him away to anyone who pays a modicum of attention to facial cues—the dog that indirectly caused the accident returns at intervals to lay a furry guilt-trip on him. But director Seong-hoon Kim fills his stylishly photographed second feature with entertaining and anxiety-producing twists.
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, April 18 at 9:15 p.m. and Tuesday, April 21 at 8:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema
Via Filmfest DC.
When this film had a brief commercial run last year, I wrote, “Director Alan Hicks is a drummer who studied under jazz trumpet legend Clark Terry, and initially approached the film project as simply an homage to his mentor. Terry’s long career has plenty of material to fill a documentary portrait with the typical historical background and context, but Hicks realized that the portrait of his teacher would be best served if he showed Terry’s generosity with his students. Thus blind pianist Justin Kauflin became an essential co-star. Keep on Keepin’ On was one of my favorite documentaries of 2014. Read my full review for Spectrum Culture here.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 17at 6:30 p.m. and Thursday, April 23 at 6:30 p.m. at Landmark E Street Cinema
Via Filmfest DC.
Ukranian director Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy is behind what may be the boldest film on this year’s Filmfest calendar. Grigoriy Fesenko plays a new arrival at a boarding school—for the deaf. The film’s performances are entirely in Ukranian sign language, and as a title card explains there are no subtitles. (The Filmfest schedule lists a subtitled version, but I hope that’s an error.) If anything, it’s too easy to understand what’s going on. Slaboshpytskiy favors long, uninterrupted takes that immerse you in the deaf world and follow a fairly conventional, if bleak, view of Deaf Teens Gone Wild, running in packs to commit robberies and even operating a prostitution ring. The Tribe comes off like a Romanian New Wave silent movie, with the most prominent sounds coming at times of trouble, as if that’s all sound is good for.
Watch the trailer.
Friday, April 17 at 8:30 p.m. and Tuesday, April 21 at 8:30 p.m. at E Street Landmark Cinema
