Pierre Niney of 18 YEARS OLD AND RISING (Film Society of Lincoln Center)

For those outside of Southern California, the Santa Barbara International Film Festival is a well-kept secret. Sorry to blow it.  Though popular on the weekends (it’s an easy daytrip from Los Angeles,), there was plenty of availability during the week. An added screening of the Oscar-nominated Bullhead was held in the cavernous 1931 movie palace the Arlington, capacity 2100. With only about 60 in the audience, it was virtually a private screening—bliss.

For filmmakers, there are advantages to participating in a regional event, even one without the bragging rights of Sundance.  Here, the festival’s the only game in town, affording filmmakers media access that they can only dream of in New York. For example, a Sunday 6:00 PM local news broadcast devoted over five minutes to the distributor-less documentary Pretty Old, about an annual beauty contest for seniors, and the Santa Barbara News-Press daily offered a full page of activities and articles.

In the more than 20 films I saw, the level of quality rarely dipped. If you want glitz and edgy grit, you can see both. This year before packed houses at the Arlington the festival presented its annual American Riviera career award to Martin Scorsese and its Virtuoso Awards to six actors hitting professional plateaus last year:  Demián Bichir, Rooney Mara, Melissa McCarthy, Patton Oswalt, Andy Serkis, and Shailene Woodley.  (All of the above made it to town except for McCarthy.) Earlier in the festival, Viola Davis won Outstanding Performer of the Year and Christopher Plummer the Modern Master Award. (Most festivals just give out one or two honors.) Year to year, the SBIFF reads the tea leaves and imbeds itself into awards season. The number of journalists and photographers on the red carpet press gauntlet outmatched those of the Tribeca or New York film festivals.

Even though there were six awards to hand out, the Virtuosos evening flew by, thanks to the off-the-cuff shtick of recipients Oswalt and then Serkis, who appeared on stage for his Q & A half-naked (it was a running joke, you had to be there).  However, Rooney Mara was particularly reticent. She looked helpless and shrugged her shoulders when asked to name one of her favorite films from last year. And without elaborating, she said she had no qualms about the extended rape scene in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and moderator Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly left it at that.

Overall, the Scorsese tribute dragged, lasting nearly two and a half hours—Leonard Maltin warned that no one was going home early. How true. Much of what was covered was familiar, with clips from Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, No Direction Known, and Hugo, for which everyone whipped out their 3-D glasses. With time running out, the 1990s and ’00s were ignored. The rarest footage was the inclusion of Italianamerican, a 1974 documentary starring his parents.

Festivals covet a cause célèbre, a polarizing film that grabs attention, assuming that sponsorship and funding are safe and sound.  The U. S. premiere of the down-and-dirty Whores’ Glory, a German/Austrian documentary triptych of three red-light districts in the developing world, delivered. As one of the programmers stated before the screening, “It’s not for everyone.”

The first part opens with a gliding tour through bright-lights-big-city Bangkok to a trip-hop soundtrack, like an outtake from Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. (Tricky and the ubiquitous Antony and the Johnsons provide tracks.) Most of director Michael Glawogger’s attention is devoted to the women working in the bar the Fishtank, who sit behind a glass wall with numbers attached to their dresses, scrutinized by customers from all over the world. If a woman is chosen, the john pays upfront (credit cards accepted) before taking an elevator down into a bedroom.  The second segment ventures to the City of Joy, Bangladesh, where the drop in living standards is sobering. Many of the girls look barely older than 12.

Unless you’ve been living in the most remote nunnery, it won’t take much imagination to guess what goes on behind closed doors, or to know that none of the women makes much money. Among other non-revelations, a street vendor admits he seeks prostitutes to enjoy himself, and one Thai prostitute reasons that “A job is a job,” but several disarming moments of honesty in the talking-head interviews stand out.

Yet… what is in it for the women to appear in the film? The chance to be heard? The attention? Extra protection? (According to the credits, “No one wanted to be mentioned by name.”) The final third, set in Reynoso, Mexico, is the most problematic.  Not once but thrice a woman, high as a kite, completely strips for the camera, either in a bar or striding down the street. In the most obvious stagey sequence, a skinny man in his twenties drives up in front of the roadside motel-like brothels. The cameraman follows him in, and he’s not camera shy. So that’s what goes on. (You might also learn a thing or two from a woman who claims to have been the whore of Reynoso.) To call the film poverty porn wouldn’t be too flippant.  The lens even catches dogs getting it on a Bangkok street. But whatever qualms there may be, it’s never less than compelling:  entirely atmospheric, vulgar, and boundary bursting.

Last year, Giorgos Lanthimos’s weirdly sinister Dogtooth was nominated was best foreign-language film (a surprise if ever there was one in that Oscar category).  His equally creepy second film Alps is also an overly elaborate riddle.  Like in Dogtooth, the allure is trying to figure out the rituals, how far the participants play within the rules, and picking up the film’s inner logic. Two men and women are emotional substitutes, sort of mercenaries of mercy, taking on the identity of a deceased for the benefit of the bereft.  They call themselves the Alps because the name’s incongruous and symbolic (perhaps like the film): irreplaceable and imposing. Actually, the de facto leader names the quartet in a fait accompli without discussion. Whoever has last the word wins. However, one of the team players goes rogue, veering away from her assigned roles. Woe to anyone who breaks the rules. If the acting comes across as stiff, it’s intentional. But because everyone assumes many personas, we don’t know who the real person is, and we don’t care. Mostly the tone is so deadpan that the film feels very constricted and airless.  Both Alps and Whores’ Glory will screen in the Film Comment Selects series in New York and will be released by Kino Lorber.

The boys of THE GIANTS (Patrick Muller/UniFrance)

The programming selections were, by and large, a cross section of bedrock of the multiplex alternative. The Giants (Les géants), from Belgium, uncannily captures the awkwardness between adolescence and the full-on teen years—no longer kids, but certainly not mature, physically or emotionally. Three resourceful, contemporary Huck Finns set out on their own in the hilly countryside during a desultory summer. Brothers Zak and Seth have been abandoned by their (never seen) mother and wait for her to call—there’s no father in the picture. The only adult men they know are the local drug dealers. Living in their dead grandfather’s house, the boys are running out of food and don’t even have enough money to buy weed. They hang out with Dany, who has run away from his abusive older brother. Despite this description, the setting is not the bleak, overcast Belgium that’s often seen. The kids take things in stride, at times laidback and then rambunctious.  Breezy and ominous, the film will sneak up on you. Look for a cameo from 1970s International it girl-turned-director Marthe Keller.

Fecklessness, thy name is Primo. One of the acting discoveries at the festival was the gangly Pierre Niney in 18 Years Old and Rising (J’aime Regarder les Filles).  Lanky and with a long face and unruly hair, Primo’s an unassuming pretty boy (Big Bird comes to mind), but Primo knows how to make a girl laugh. The joke may be at his expense, but he leaves the party with plenty of phone numbers. Women instantly want to baby him.

He’s away from home on his own in Paris preparing for university, spending all of his parents’ money trying to keep up with a clique of right-wing rich kids, during the 1981 election of leftist President François Mitterand.  Primo’s not drawn to their politics but their lifestyle (the chance to summer on the Riviera) and a demure blond bombshell. He plays everyone to his advantage—especially his mother, who has spoiled him rotten. Narcissistic, with a mix of vulnerability and charm, he just wants to be liked, even though he often needs a good slap across the face. Slowly, Primo become less self-involved and falls from the pedestal in his imagination.

The knowing comedy certainly lives up to the stereotype of the French laissez-fare attitude towards sex. Where else would a father makes his daughter breakfast after she’s brought a boy home—while she wears the guy’s underwear to the kitchen table? The film screens next month at New York’s Rendez-Vous with French Cinema.

Adele Haenel in HEAT WAVE (UniFrance)

In the description for Heat Wave (Après le Sud), the festival program guide too-cautiously warns that it “contains graphic sex and nudity.” The noteworthy directorial debut by Jean-Jacques Jauffret is an example of the private-in-public school of acting. The disrobing, far from tantalizing, is matter of fact and discomforting. All four lead characters strip down, one way or another.  Ten years ago, intertwining French narratives were all the rage. Here four storylines are loosely connected through a mother and daughter. True to the threat hinted in the first frame, where an elderly pensioner cleans a rifle, it ends in violence. Despite the too-unified ending, each thread holds up on its harrowing terms. The fragments are more persuasive than the whole. Of all the films seen at the festival, this had the strongest ensemble, including actresses Sylvie Lachat, whose character endures an incredible panic attack, and Adele Haenel, a sleepy-eyed Sharon Stone. (She’s nominated this year for the most promising Actress César Award for House of Pleasures).

Johan Libéreau and Christa Theret in TWIGGY (UniFrance)

The last film I took in offered another discovery, the Botticelli-like beauty of Christa Theret in the oddly named Twiggy. The French title, La Brindille, translates as “the stick.” (Theret is also up for the same César award as Haenel.) At 81 minutes, the methodical drama is concise and subtle, but never underpowered. Theret plays Sarah Dole, a 20-year-old university student who learns she’s six months pregnant. She’s not even showing, which would otherwise be obvious by the way she’s dressed—baby doll dresses with tennis shoes and leather jacket. Apparently, this does happen, even when a woman is eight months along, and I chose to trust the film’s word on this matter.

Sarah doesn’t want the baby. She throws away the sonogram, misses doctor’s appointments (and doesn’t care), doesn’t tell her mother, and keeps to herself from other expecting single mothers. If you believe in the horoscope, you’ll totally understand her stubbornness—she’s a Taurus.

Another film filled with beautiful moments, the lovely Italian charmer Horses (Cavalli) is an old-fashioned throwback to the 1970s, offering the similar raw and rustic charm of Ermanno Olmi’s The Tree of the Wooden Clogs. Set in the northern hinterlands sometime before World War I, two young boys are let loose onto the world by their stern alcoholic father after the death of their protective mother (Asia Argento). All they have are their clothes on their backs and their horses. (Like Spielberg’s old Hollywood take on War Horse, this is a reminder of a time when a horse was a huge investment and crucial to a farmer’s livelihood.) One brother goes off to live with a surrogate farming family, the other hits the big city, well, the local village. Politics of class permeate this simple and affecting allegory, which depicts a way of life too harshly to succumb to sentimentality. Life is unfair.  It’s how you deal with it that counts.

The festival is not entirely Eurocentric. One of the films earning the strongest word of mouth was Lucky, from the new South Africa, where, in the words of an elderly Indian woman, “You have to tolerate,” even reluctantly.  This crowdpleaser gently pulls your heart strings, and because of director Avie Luthra’s restraint and trust in the material, it leaves the emoting to the audience. And that’s quite an achievement considering the story, prime for emotional excess. After the death of his mother (from AIDS), 10-year-old Lucky leaves his dusty Zulu village for Durban to live with his uncle, who spends the money meant for his education on booze and his girlfriend (the couple is the film’s only one-dimensional characters).  Reluctantly, the stern Indian neighbor takes him in after his uncle throws him out on the street and helps the tenacious orphan search for his father.

Besides international art house fare, the festival bestowed its audience favorite award to the French-Canadian Starbuck, an amicable situation comedy where a  middle-aged ne’re-do-well man/child finds out his sperm donations back in the ’90s have paid off huge dividends: he fathered hundreds of offspring, and 144 want to contact him.  It also threw a spotlight on star-driven, low-to-medium budget dramas that are not exactly easy to market: Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas in the mind-bender The Woman in the Fifth and Vincent Cassel in the lurid medieval allegory The Monk. At least one film will open nationwide next month, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, which contains almost three movies in one: satire (Kristin Scott Thomas, again, barrels through the film as a political operative barking into her Bluetooth), romcom, plus a little bit of a thriller, but Emily Blunt and Ewan McGregor make a great couple, and they clearly enjoying the sparing banter. After Beginners, McGregor has cornered the market as the self-effacing, reserved romantic lead.

Sebastian Schipper as Simon in 3 (Strand Releasing)

It’s hard to put a fresh spin on infidelity dramas nowadays. Yet they are still effective, maybe one of the most shocking and gripping forms of drama when in the hands of a talented filmmaker. For a little while, at least, Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run and Perfume) pulls off a cool little twist to his tale of a trio of lovers. It might not be a completely original story, but then again this director hasn’t done something like this before either.

Hanna and Simon are a middle-class Berlin couple in their 40s, together since the early 1990s and on the verge of marriage. They both have comfortable jobs (she as a television reporter, he as an art installation designer), and they seem to be quite happy and very much in love. Curious then that they should meet the same man separately, Adam, a slightly younger genetic scientist.

First, Hanna’s affair with Adam seems to grow out of simple mutual likeability (their first tryst occurs while Simon is treated for testicular cancer—imagery of which one can’t shake off very easily). Naturally she hides it from the very vulnerable Simon, still on the mend. And then it’s Simon who meets Adam by chance at a swimming pool. And so it goes…

The ingredients of this story are enticing and also pregnant with possibilities, but Tykwer is interested more in showing off than being a full-on storyteller. This isn’t to say that when he has two characters (or more) in a room talking he can’t make it visually arresting. Frank Griebe’s dark shadows and compositions emphasize the characters’ physicality and warmness amid the transmutable (or questioning?) morality, and there are some scenes that crackle with masterful, dramatic tension.

But the same director of Run Lola Run can’t let go of trying to dazzle with visual pyrotechnics. Some of these flourishes are captivating. He makes a montage of passing time a little less dry than usual by having split-screens that float one on top of another as Simon/Adam, Simon/Sophie, and Sophie/Adam have sex and then continue on with their daily lives. Other times, like a dream Simon has of his teeth falling out, is oblique and just too weird. (Another instance, fairly early in the film where the three main characters are set against a completely white background like in The Matrix, goes nowhere, except to foreshadow the ending, which I’ll get to in a moment).

The actors are all fine—Sebastian Schipper, perhaps best of all, conveys a very strong vulnerability, particularly in his scenes with one of the doctors attending to Simon before his cancer surgery. Devid Striesow, as Adam, has an oddly alluring presence, despite being not conventionally handsome, and Sophie Rois has her best moment when Hannah comes to a quiet realization about her life while she appears on a talk show listening to a talking head go on about living “beyond the categories of recognition.”

I admire Tykwer’s daring attempts to give this bizarre love triangle a dramatic visual sense. However, when it comes to the main idea he’s going for, about breaking free of the rules of socialization (according to the press notes), I’m not sure what to make of it. The film isn’t as deep thematically as he might think it is, despite the occasional heady dialogue. If anything, his tics as a stylist get in the way of the more emotional moments of the story.

It all comes to a head with a profoundly odd ending. Without saying too much, it feels kind of complete as a story. The character have found resolution, and yet a) it’s not really wrapped up with anything close to an explanation as to why Simon and Hanna still feel the way they do about Adam, and b) it’s achieved with a final-shot-visual-metaphor that made me yell at the screen. Somehow Tykwer, who also pulled off a confounding, WTF ending with Perfume (massive inexplicable orgy, anyone?) tops himself here with something more operatic… and hollow.

Chico (voiced by Emar Xor Oña (GKIDS/Luma Films)

Chico & Rita is an animated delight for the eye and ear, besides being a sexy romance and a luscious tribute to a great musician.

Spanish director Fernando Trueba first documented his passion for Latin jazz in Calle 54 (2000), offering brief biographical introductions to a dozen masters and rising stars in exquisite, sophisticated performances. Much as Wim Wenders’ Buena Vista Social Club the year before reintroduced the world to an older generation of Cuban musicians, Trueba’s “new” discovery for jazz audiences was Cuban pianist Bebo Valdés, who had been living in quiet European exile after the revolution. Valdés continued to work with Trueba, and Chico & Rita is their creative collaboration that draws on the nonagenarian’s life and music to weave a fictional story of the intertwined careers, travels, and loves of a pianist and a singer.

Elderly Chico shines shoes in contemporary Havana in the opening sequence, but a nostalgic radio program sends him back to his thoughts of 1948, when he was sure he could win a contest for a regular hotel gig—if only he could find the right girl singer to front his band. Not that he’s having trouble getting women. Havana is colorfully portrayed as a hot spot for American gamblers, sailors, and tourists, especially those seeking some interracial spice. He immediately falls for Rita’s singing (performed by Idania Valdés, no relation to Bebo) as much as for her earthy sexiness. (It’s great to see an animated female who doesn’t look like a Disney princess or mother.) Pursuing her from famous nightclubs to underground dance halls, he gets her into his bed (warning—full frontal cartoon nudity), and into his music (played by Bebo), naming a love song for her. But their romance and ambitions keep getting entangled with jealous ex-girlfriends and white promoters.

Rita gets tempted to perform in New York, giving Chico nightmares about the Big Apple, including fears that she will be reduced to a Carmen Miranda stereotype. When he follows her, the whole look and sound of the film changes to the cold, hard, monochromatic reality of immigrant life. (Chico’s friend and manager, Ram?n, can only find work as a doorman at the Plaza.) But she finds success as Rita LaBelle, based on her exotic sex appeal and singing talent, much like how Lena Horne was presented in the movies, and Chico finds creative satisfaction in the burgeoning bebop scene, alongside the first Cuban percussionists in jazz bands. The animated cameos of jazz greats, some brought to life on the soundtrack by noted jazzmen, are great fun—Charlie Parker (saxophone played by Germán Velazco); Tito Puente (played by Amadito Valdés, no relation, of Buena Vista Social Club); Nat King Cole (sung by his brother Freddy Cole); and Ben Webster (saxophone played by octogenarian Jimmy Heath). One of the beauties of Bebo’s score is its fealty to authentic jazz, without resorting to a fusion with salsa or commercial dance pop to appeal to a broad audience.

Though Chico travels with the likes of Woody Herman and Dizzie Gillespie to Europe and onto other women, he can’t forget Rita, and a fleeting reunion ends up getting him deported back to Cuba, just in time for the revolution. (The informative Unfinished Spaces, directed by Alysa Nahmias and Benjamin Murray, now making the festival rounds, documents the creative fervor among Cuban artists at this time and the disastrous impact on their work and lives when modernism was declared counter-revolutionary.)

Spanish flamenco singer Estrella Morente rescues Chico’s career late in life for a success that would seem too Hollywood if it didn’t parallel Bebo’s own rejuvenation, let alone a Vegas reunion with Rita. Even as musicians protest the elimination of Latin jazz as a distinct Grammy category from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated Chico & Rita for Best Animated Feature in support of beautiful hand-drawn animation for grown-ups.

MyAnna Buring in KILL LIST (IFC Films)

British director Ben Wheatley’s heady genre mashup Kill List is how midnight movies are supposed to be: smart, weird, and extremely disturbing. A scene late in the film has a man cornered in a dark sewer, forced to shoot point-blank waves of shrieking naked cultists with flabby bellies and sagging breasts. It’s the kind of stuff that can permanently ruin the sexuality of any poor kid who sneaks into the film mistakenly hoping for a Jason Statham beat-’em-up.

Wheatley, who co-wrote the film with his wife, Amy Jump, stirs a witches’ brew of genre influences. You have elements of a Don Siegel hit man movie (with the contrasting quirks of two humanized killers) and the pained, methodical bleakness and staccato, jump-cut rhythm of cinema vérité ; and, well, the original version of The Wicker Man. Roughly, the story goes like this: after a botched mission in the Ukraine, Jay (Neil Maskell), an ex-soldier turned hired killer, is stewing at home in Britain with his Swedish-born wife, Shel (MyAnna Buring), and his young son. His best mate and fellow hit man, Sam (Harry Simpson), and Sam’s mysterious girlfriend (Emma Fryer) stop by one night for a rather strained dinner party, which ends with the two men grappling each other—they’re the kind of Fight Club guys who bond through drunken brawls. The visit isn’t only a friendly one, though: Sam brings news that they have a job. Soon, they meet up with the rather generically sinister head of the shadowy organization they work for, who has tasked the two men with three contract killings. Their mission begins matter-of-factly enough. The first mark is a priest, but something is not quite right, and by the time the tale ends, they’ll be fleeing those naked cultists through the sewers.

And what’s not quite right? That’s the movie’s real question. Suffice it to say, the answer probably lies more with Jay than with his job. The cracks appear early on. Near the beginning, he finds the remains of a rabbit left on his lawn by his cat, and he promptly fries it up and eats it. Later, he has an eczema breakout a doctor strongly hints is imaginary. And why, on one of his missions, does he see his friend’s girlfriend waving at him in the hotel parking lot at night? The break in reality is emphasized by Jim Williams’ eerie, wailing score, tellingly more fitting for a movie about demonic possession than contract killers.

I usually find the did-it-all-happen-in-his-head-or-didn’t-it? gimmick tiresome, but not here. Partly, that’s because the cast, who apparently improvised some of their lines, are excellent, with Maskell and Buring making a believably oddball family, and the film sustains a powerful atmosphere of dread and discomfort, with just the right leavening of raw black comedy. It remains gripping even in scenes that tread dangerously close to the ridiculous. I can more or less see what Wheatley was getting at in his interview with The Guardian last year, in which he said, with his film, he was hoping to tap into some of the unease in Britain right now over foreign wars and economic woes. It’s not that he made a message movie, or if he did, the message is in the mood: dank, repulsive, and vague.

Krzysztof Skonieczny (standing) and Robert Wieckiewicz in IN DARKNESS (Jasmin Marla Dichant/Sony PIctures Classics)

More than two decades ago, Polish director Agnieszka Holland brought to life the extraordinary biography of how one young Jewish man survived the Holocaust by hiding inside the heart of Nazi darkness in Europa Europa. With even more visual impact, In Darkness, a nominee for the Foreign-Language Film Academy Award, tells a harrowing true story of a group of Jews hidden underneath ghetto streets. But it also reveals the ordinary man who was their crucial pipeline to survival.

By the spring of 1943, Lvov, Poland (now Lviv in the Ukraine) had been buffeted between Soviet then German occupation. Ukrainian nationalists allied with the Nazis to control the city, first pushing a hundred thousand Jews into a restrictive ghetto, then forcing them into the factories of the Janowska slave labor camp, which became the deadly gateway to the Belzec extermination camp. Amidst attacks on Jews, Leopold Socha (Robert Wieckiewicz), who goes by the name Poldek, and his co-worker Stefek (Krzysztof Skonieczny) rummage around a nice apartment in the emptying ghetto and hide their stolen goods underneath a manhole cover where they work—in the sewers.

As Poldek enjoys a comfortable respite with his wife Wanda (Kinga Presis) and young daughter, Jews are negotiating to survive, like black marketer Mundek Margulies (Benno Fürmann), who trades goods for food (garnering the ghetto nickname of “Pirate”—it sounds like “Corsair” in Polish), while others search for escape routes, like a group digging through a basement to reach the sewer tunnels. When they break through, they are confronted by the sewer workers. There’s deep mistrust on both sides—until Poldek follows them back to the cellar and sees a mother and her two young children. He agrees to assist them—for a fee, even though a Ukrainian police officer, who he had been a snitch for in the past, now wants Poldek’s help to collect the bounties on any Jews found in underground.

In the horrible, brutal chaos of the final ghetto liquidation, more Jews try to frantically flee underground, where supplies and valuables fall out of reach. But they complain about the rats and dank conditions, and resent each other’s differences—including religious observance, class, and origins, let alone the crying toddler. With Holland’s insistence that the story be realistically told through many dialects, language and education become a point of contention and mockery. (Fürmann is such a major German actor that it took me a few minutes to realize he was playing a Polish Jew, until he talks of a long sojourn in Germany).

Poldek insists he can only sneak down supplies for the original group who have pooled their payments (subsidized mostly from the remnants of one family’s jewelry store). So a difficult decision has to be made of who will have to find shelter within the tunnels on their own. Even with this terrible dilemma in the face of relentless pursuers, some can’t face the awful conditions, others think they can follow other routes to safety, some prefer suicide, and many are killed at the exit points by guns and grenades. When they crawl to a temporary haven below a church, things change from bad to worse.

Over an astounding14 months, portrayed with gripping tension, Poldek above ground and the group below deal with the constant threat of discovery due to the slightest slip; the ravages of disease, vermin, limited rations, seasonal floods (as vivid as Titanic in narrow tubes), planted mines; and ever more draconian choices amidst the ebb and flow of human interactions in the filthy confines. The cinematography is a staggering tour de force by director of photography Jolanta Dylewska, allowing the audience’s eyes to adjust and make out faces and actions in the flicker of feeble lanterns. We reel back at each glimpse of daylight.

In terms of style and theme, Holland very much follows in the footsteps of her mentor, Polish master Andrzej Wajda, who has also revisited the complexities of World War II several times. The vicious anti-Semitic Ukrainians are the Nazis’ henchmen and a working-class Polish nationalist is the hero, with the Soviet onslaught providing a tragic coda. Very little, amazingly, is fictionalized—a couple of participants conflated, insinuations made explicit, minor incidents ratcheted up for cinematic expression. Krystyna Chiger wrote about this experience from her childhood perspective in her 2008 memoir, The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust’s Shadow (she’s portrayed in the film), while the thrilling In the Sewers of Lvov (1990), based on journals and interviews with the adult survivors who hid their story for decades from resurgent anti-Semitism, will now hopefully be brought back into print and buttress Holland’s tremendous tribute to their formidable perseverance.

With Hugo and The Artist reminding audiences of the impact, and neglect, of silent films, comes the timely work of an avant-garde artist who imaginatively re-purposes archival footage in collaborations with contemporary musicians. Through six thematic movements, The Miners’ Hymns (now at Film Forum) opened the retrospective “Bill Morrison: A Modern Master of Silent Film” at the recent Silent Films/Live Music series with a live performance of Johann Johannsson’s stirring score, achingly performed by the Wordless Music Orchestra. This presentation made clearer how the silent footage is integrated with the music than in my first viewing at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival.

Foghorns seem to blare in the distance during the opening aerial approach over the northeast England coast, heading through the mists of time in the 10-minute opening movement “They Being Dead yet Speaketh.” (For a Morrison film, these contemporary color segments by Steve Desbrow are atypical). Flying over empty fields, parking lots, and shopping malls, names and dates appear, as if from old maps, of the mining sites (called collieries) that had operated for more than one hundred years, one from 1855 to 1968, another from 1809 to 1929.

In the elegiac second movement, “An Injury to One is the Concern of All,” people from the past appear in black and white, morphing in dress styles over those decades, but all silently waiting for news of survivors from one mining disaster after another. (The film’s title and Johannsson’s leitmotifs are taken from a memorial hymn for miners killed in 1934.) Glimpsed in these anxious crowds are the colliery brass bands, and the score incorporates brass brand instrumentation. (The ending of that long tradition was marked in the 1996 feature Brassed Off.)

In the 11-minute “Freedom From Want and Fear,” Morrison edits footage from the National Coal Board’s Film Unit, preserved by the British Film Institute National Archive (also in a nod to its 75th Anniversary), to show the rhythms of the miners’ daily grind—the pre-dawn walk to work from the company houses; the mass of laborers heading down to dig, first with horses, then underground trains; and the encroaching mechanization on an ever larger scale. Johannsson’s score sensitively resists the bombastic accompaniment of so many documentaries that use silent film;

“There is No Safe Side but the Side of Truth” expands on the themes of environmental and human degradation caused by the industry over the century. The endless rows of miners’ housing are caught in sooty smog, the coast is clogged with coal slurry, and children turn mountains of coal slag into playground slides. And then there’s the beginning of the end. As Morrison shifts from archival footage to television coverage, the community and the police brace for the strikes of the 1980s.

The “Industrial and Provident, We United to Assist Each Other” movement is a sobering counterpart to the sympathetic portrayal of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s industrial policies in the current The Iron Lady as bobbies beat miners protesting over the shutdown of their livelihoods. The helicopter tour of the scenes of closed collieries resumes—one is now an artificial snow slide, another an empty stadium.

Like ghosts, the proud miners and their families return in the stately final movement, “The Cause of Labor Is the Hope of the World,” a montage from years of the Durham Miners’ Gala. Since 1871, the “Big Meeting” was the largest annual trade union gathering in Europe, where each lodge paraded with its own band and militant banners, a heritage that is the basis for the BRASS – Durham International Festival, which commissioned this piece.

Also in the series, Morrison’s The Great Flood is a more historical and chronological approach to a human disaster, edited for political and social points, with folksy music by guitarist Bill Frisell. He had lots of newsreel footage to draw from of the record rain, raging waters, and tall heights of mud that inundated hundreds of thousands of acres and overwhelmed people all along the Mississippi River and its tributaries in 1927, which, unfortunately, still seems familiar. (An episode of PBS’s American Experience “Fatal Flood” a decade ago covered this influential event very well.) The pre- and post-flood footage of the lives of African Americans is extraordinary, and justifies screening this film in educational settings.

Morrison’s recent historical approach to rediscovering archival and “found footage” is a contrast to his first major, hour-long work, Decasia (2002), that concluded this year’s series, accompanied with an exquisite live performance of Michael Gordon’s throbbing score by the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble. He used decaying celluloid, particularly of nitrate film (that Scorsese in Hugo laments led to the loss of Georges Méliès’ oeuvre) to strikingly symbolize despair for the future of mankind. The damaged blotches and distortions of individual frames look like human devolution, going from microorganisms to monsters. So many times I’ve found the “found footage” movement in documentary filmmaking just an excuse for lazy or gimmicky editing, but Morrison’s creative teaming with musicians, combined with empathy and a strong sensibility for the raw material, raises appreciation for archival silent footage to another level.

Film Forum will also be screening three Morrison shorts: Release (2010), a pan of an expectant crowd waiting, to no avail, to see Al Capone leave jail in 1930; Outerborough (2005), an 1899 crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge; and The Film of Her (1996), a history of the movies through a compilation of classic movie clips from the Library of Congress.

Linda Cardellini and Maichael Shannon in RETURN (DADA Films)

This may be the year of the relapse movie. In the case of Return, the drug is the armed forces. An impressive Linda Cardellini stars as Kelli, a U.S. soldier returning from deployment to her small town and awaiting husband and two girls. It doesn’t take long for the pressures of life to rival those of battle, and when she receives orders for her second tour, Kelli frantically rethinks all the constants she thought were a part of her life. This mostly unremarkable film, which somehow premiered at the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes, has, at least, an important story to tell.

Michael Shannon is Mike, her conscientious plumber/husband who, in her absence, has done well taking care of the household and kids, but he has also been seeing another woman. Kelli largely takes this news like the soldier she is, pressing on in the face of the challenge, yet her time away from the family and her recurring episodes with alcohol have put her in legal limbo concerning her family. Soon, with the lack of Mike’s support and with only limited custody of the kids, things start to fall apart for her. The drinking gets more out of hand. She fraternizes with seedy strangers, and suddenly, another deployment starts to look like a pretty good option.

But I’m reading a lot into this. What the film doesn’t do well is give you a stake in the outcome. I found myself sometimes rooting against Kelli, if for nothing else than in hopes of actually feeling something from watching the film. I never quite understood what Kelli had lost when her family drifted away from her because we never knew her family prior to her deployment and what dynamic existed beforehand.

However, what the film does well is take its events in stride, like Kelli. What could be a harshly melodramatic sob story is instead much more character driven. Cardellini does a great job, giving us several subtle emotions at any given moment, and I really found myself fascinated by several supporting characters, namely Kelli’s new Alcoholics Anonymous friend, Bud (John Slattery), and her longtime girlfriend Shannon (Louisa Krause). In both cases, I found them to be far better used than the usually fascinating Michael Shannon, in a poorly written role. (I didn’t know it was possible to make Michael Shannon forgettable, yet thinking back on his work here, it’s the only word that comes to mind.) Both Bud and Shannon, minor but essential characters, are depressingly small townish to the gills, exhausting any idea one might offer on how Kelli can kick this funk. With friends like these…

But Kelli’s not a total victim, or so freshman writer-director Liza Johnson implies. Sure, the army’s gonna chew you up and spit you out without a support net, as it does tens of thousands of vets each year, but Kelli wrestles with actual personal responsibility here. You don’t give up when you lose custody of your kids, you don’t give up when you seek help for alcoholism, and you don’t give up when you are ordered back to Afghanistan. This is definitely a movie about what it’s like when the going gets tough. Let’s just hope Kelli, and those tens of thousands like her, are, well, tough.

Dreama Walker in COMPLIANCE (Sundance Film Festival)

After a foot of snow on opening weekend, it was been nothing but blue skies in Park City last week. But enough about the weather, here’s the word on the shuttle buses.

Worth the hype: Beasts of the Southern Wild, Benh Zeitlin’s follow-up to his Sundance short Glory at Sea, was a favorite for the Grand Jury Prize, which it won. The Surrogate, directed by veteran Ben Lewin, earned an audience award and had the biggest acquisition price tag this year, around $6 million, and its ensemble cast won a Special Jury Prize. I Am Not a Hipster, by Destin Daniel Cretton, who won an award in 2009 for his Sundance short Short Term 12, is another release I’m anxiously awaiting. Robot and Frank, Celeste and Jesse, Detropia, and How to Survive a Plague are all attracting folks as well.

What failed to impress: Your Sister’s Sister, Lynn Shelton’s follow up to her 2009 official selection Humpday. Again it sees a trio of lead characters embroiled in an awkward sexual triangle between two sisters, played by Emily Blunt and Rosemarie DeWitt, and their would-be liaison (Mark Duplass). Though very well shot and acted, Shelton leaves out the entire resolution of the film and places a heavy-handed and overly melodramatic montage sequence in its place. What a way to ruin this unique and fun setup. So Yong Kim’s latest, For Ellen, has very little of the harmonic beauty of her previous films (Treeless Mountain, In Between Days), and instead has empty and needlessly slow scenes about the pain a rock musician (Paul Dano) goes through in fighting for custody of his daughter. There are a few beautiful, transcendent, and serene Kim-esque moments, but ultimately the film is lacking in story. The Comedy, directed by Rick Alverson, stars Tim Heidecker from TV’s Tim and Eric’s Awesome Show, Great Job! as a flailing ne’er-do-well in hipster Brooklyn generally going around behaving like a jackass and wasting time with his snarky friends, played by a host of real-life hipsters, which include Tim’s comedy partner Eric Wareheim and LCD Soundsystem’s ultra-in James Murphy. The film somehow takes itself and its borderline experimental comedy too seriously (an amazing feat of irony).

Favorites: Keep the Lights On, the third Sundance feature for writer-director Ira Sachs, is excellent. His lead, Thure Lindhart, is magnetic and heartbreaking as he negotiates a decade-long relationship with meth-addicted Paul (Zachary Booth). This beautiful, subtle, and bold narrative will leave you in tears. The mercurial relationship hinges on recognizable real-life moments, and Sachs’s careful depiction of this abused but loyal boyfriend is tremendous. Oslo, August 31st is also a film about a relapse. Norwegian director Joachim Trier takes us through a day in the life of Anders (Anders Danielsen Lie) as he leaves rehab for a job interview and suddenly encounters the pressures of his former life. Trier has a keen sense of storytelling, and provides an intimate setting as we learn about what it feels to be a recovering addict.

Compliance is turning heads this year, and the Q & As have been intense. Irate audience members have been asked to leave (or maybe that was during Simon Killer, Antonio Campos’s dark but well-made and beautifully shot second feature about an abusive sexual predator that stars Brady Corbet—neither would surprise me). Craig Zobel’s film, based on a true story about a prank caller who impersonates a police officer and convinces a fast-food chain manager to strip search her cashier, will stick in your head for a long, long time. Zobel is careful to toe the line between believability and outrage as the terrible events unfold. By the end, the audience walks out feeling practically complicit in the assault. It’s an intense experience, and it will surprise you in how well it keeps you engaged. Simon Killer is not quite the story I was hoping for; it’s a major downer, and feels more like a therapy session for its heady director than it does a character exploration. The filmmaking is remarkably accomplished though. Campos’s camera placement is interesting, the cinematography is excellent, and the soundtrack is unbelievable.

Nice surprises: Josh Radnor’s second feature, Liberal Arts, will sneak up on you. Elizabeth Olsen is beautiful and infectious as Zibby, a college student enamored with Radnor’s returning alumnus Jesse. The two begin a cute but doomed romance (because of a 10-plus age difference), and this lighthearted flick does everything a fun romantic comedy should, like make you laugh and cry—sometimes at the same time. Radnor, bucking a trend when prominent actors become directors, is smart not to let his actors wander too much in their roles. He is a remarkably disciplined director, and only Richard Jenkins overacts out of this entire star-speckled cast. You might even like Zac Efron, I swear.

Corpo Celeste is an incredible first feature that premiered at Cannes 2011. Kudos to head of programming Trevor Groth and festival director John Cooper for their insight in including films like this. This bold and amazing Italian coming-of-age piece by Alice Rohrwacher, about a puberty-age Catholic girl learning about her changing body, adds just the kind of richness that continues to keep this festival at the forefront of programming.

Stay tuned for a final roundup and full reviews of these films and more as they are released in theaters.

Miriam Makeba in Lionel Rogosin's COME BACK, AFRICA (Milestone Films/Film Forum)

Come Back, Africa was one of the first films to expose black Africans’ life under apartheid to the world in 1959. But beyond its significance as a historical time capsule, the American premiere of the 2005 restoration, with fresh subtitles, reveals a striking exemplar of the political “docufiction” of director Lionel Rogosin. He expanded the skills he developed in combining the styles of Robert Flaherty and the Italian neorealists in his groundbreaking On the Bowery to focus on a searing international issue.

The black-and-white film intercuts actual scenes of the daily experiences of black Africans a decade into the increasing restrictions of apartheid within a barely fictionalized story of one man’s travails. Blacks are first seen pouring out of trains into the city each day, seeking work. Zachariah (played by genuine rural migrant Zacharia Mgabi) starts out at a gold mine, where he chafes at a misleading labor contract, the backbreaking work, crowded dorms, and meager pay. But his descriptions of the mines are not just talk—the grueling conditions are strikingly filmed. In the dark of the 24/7 operation, the only light above ground shines from the helmets of the endless line of miners going down to the sweaty confines of the underground dig, with no safety equipment. (In one of many subterfuges Rogosin used to obtain his extraordinary footage, he persuaded the manager that he was showing off the modernity of the mine.)

In the dorm, Zachariah learns of the twisted requirement that he can’t get other work in the city unless he has a pass, but he can’t get a pass unless he has a job. (This is before Catch-22 was published to give a label to such a bureaucratic conundrum.) But friends help him, as they do wherever he goes, so that Zachariah takes job after job before his pass expires. Even as some white employers are initially sympathetic, the racism of Afrikaners stymies him: a nasty, scolding housewife and her apathetic husband; a suspicious garage owner; a hotel manager anxious to keep his irrationally threatened guests happy; and a construction foreman with rigid rules, played by anti-apartheid activists with an authentic feel for the sharp vernacular in the improvised dialogue. As exceptional as it was to film with black African leads, the integrated cast alone made it an outlaw production.

Zachariah’s wife, Vinah (played by professional actress Vinah Bendile), illegally joins him in the city after leaving their famine-stricken farm, and they try to find some place to live together in the traditionally mixed-race Sophiatown, just as it was being razed to force blacks into more restricted areas further away. As the film became an elegy for the vibrant culture of Sophiatown while it was disappearing, music is a central and powerful element throughout. Rogosin used another approved cover story of showing “happy Africans” singing and dancing outdoors in street corner bands and community celebrations, and indoors in the smoky clubs called shabeens. One outstanding performance gained the film attention both for introducing the late Miriam Makeba to a wider international audience and for getting her banned from South Africa for 30 years. Young, strikingly beautiful, and talented, her two songs are electrifying. (Also screening in festivals in what would have been her 80th year is the informative biographical documentary Mama Africa that details the impact of this brief appearance on her life and career.)

The gatherings in the shabeen, where she casually entertains, are also the most overtly political scenes (if a bit stilted), as noted writers and intellectuals, including journalist Can Themba, dance, drink, and debate the impact of apartheid on the African National Congress (whose leaders were on trial), white liberals, and the rise of the local thugs known as tsotsis (even more here about black-on-black crime than in 2005’s Tsotsi). These pressures take a tragic and very emotional toll on Zachariah’s family that is as allegorical as it is moving.

The story behind the making of Come Back, Africa is as fascinating as what’s seen on screen. An American in Sophiatown, directed by Lionel’s son Michael (who was born in Johannesburg as the filming was being completed), is chock full of anecdotes in interviews with his parents and several of the film’s participants, as well as a tour of the bland walled suburb that replaced Sophiatown. It will be included on Milestone’s upcoming DVD release. In the 100th anniversary year of the ANC, the documentary series Have You Heard from Johannesburg, currently on PBS’s Independent Lens, shows how this landmark film fits in the overall context about South Africa, apartheid, and the international response for its deserved place in history.

Jérémie Elkaïm and Valérie Donzelli, with baby Adam (Sundance Selects)

Whatever direction Valérie Donzelli takes in her second feature film, she goes all out. That all of her narrative detours don’t always fit in place is another matter. She deliberately shakes up your expectations, making her family-in-crisis drama insistently optimistic, and not a dirge. Though Donzelli and her cast don’t hold back, the movie feels half-measured.

It begins with a young mother (played by the director) taking her mop-headed eight-year-old son for a doctor’s appointment, an MRI scan actually, then jumps in time to her sipping beer at a darkly lit house party with the cool crowd, where she locks eyes with a scruffy, sleepy-eyed Romeo. He’s not just symbolically a doomed romantic figure, that’s his name, played by the film’s co-writer and Donzelli’s former off-screen partner Jérémie Elkaïm. Before they speak, he tosses her a peanut from across the room. His aim is true—she catches it in her mouth. In fact, they’re instantly in sync, and as we will see, they physically mirror each other, jogging or chain-smoking in unison. At first, she doesn’t believe that’s his name—hers is Juliette. They immediately smirk over the coincidence on behalf of the audience (but some eye rolling might come later). Though they wouldn’t be out of place in Williamsburg—they’re hip, but not insufferably so. The soundtrack, on the other hand, is a high-brow mix tape, from Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” to Vivaldi.

A montage of their whirlwind romance backs up Paris’s romantic reputation. Then abruptly Donzelli bursts the couple’s insular frivolity in a brilliant transition, cutting from a close-up shot of Gustave Courbet’s still-graphic 1866 painting L’Origine du Monde to a close-up of a wrinkly brand new baby, their son Adam (again, a symbolic name). Then the nightmare-during-daytime begins. First, the scrawny newborn is a screamer. Once he’s on a regular feeding schedule, he calms down, but then as the months progress, he vomits his food, doesn’t learn to walk or play with others, and one side of his face swells. Whatever it is that is attacking their infant’s health, possibly fatally, Romeo and Juliette pledge to fight it rationally but diligently, while keeping their cool. They cut off ties to work and friends, and practically move into the hospital, caring for their son full-time.

Yet the title doesn’t fit. It’s too belligerent considering the benevolent movie characters, who go out of their way to have a positive and constructive attitude. (A TV news broadcast announces the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq underlines the theme of combat—with a leaden touch.) About the only thing Romeo and Juliette don’t do is break out with a cheery Rogers & Hammerstein number, though they sing a love duet of sorts, cooing come-ons like “I like your straight nose.” However, we, as an audience, want our characters to suffer. We’re supposed to triumph. It’s okay if they crash and burn on screen. And when they do here, it’s too much. It’s not that the reactions of the couple and their extended family aren’t justified (Adam’s condition becomes quite grave), but all of a sudden the cast channels the gusto of Anna Magnani, with two dramatic public meltdowns and one smashed beer bottle. Though Donzelli has stated that the facts of the story are very close to what she and Elkaïm experienced when their real-life son was also seriously ill, she insists this isn’t their story. A strong dose of realism adds another layer to the tonal mix in the hospital scenes filmed at the Gustave Roussy Institute, where the filmmakers’ son was treated.

Donzelli physically sprints through her scenes, and no sequence overstays its welcome. She also keeps the movie moving along at a clipped pace through the many camera tricks in her arsenal, like a zoom to a ringing telephone. Three narrators connect the vignettes, but the voice-overs are also an easy short cut to wrap the film up. Yet it’s only at the end that we find out an insightful bit of information that perks up the ears and sounds more dramatic than what we’ve seen, and we can’t help but think up another movie in our heads, one that’s not quite as nice.