The Two Eyes Of Terri Saul

If you didn't attend some wonderful repertory/revival film screenings in 2012, you missed out. As nobody could see them all, I've recruited Frisco Bay filmgoers to recall some of their own favorites of the year. An index of participants is found here.  

The following list comes from Terri Saul, visual artist, writer and cinephile.

My film-viewing this year began and ended on high notes, sitting next to an aviation enthusiast. While my fiancé and theatrical co-conspirator supported my movie-watching habit, all the films we saw together now fall into one of two categories in my memory: those seen prior to surgery and those experienced after surgery. Integrated into my cinema-going life were hints of pending illness such as petit-mal seizures, periods of dizziness and sensitivity to lights, especially the flickering kind. Being able to tolerate a full-length film became a challenge that I was determined to test. I brought sunglasses with me when I was still fresh out of the hospital and just prior to my treatment. Relieved to now be able to tolerate everything from long foreign films to a twenty-minute "photo roman," I'm happy to be back in the squeaky seats of the Bay Area's finest rep houses and film archives with a newfound festival pass to life! I want to thank my partner Josh for helping me through pre- and post-production of the all-too-true thriller, the story of last year. It's over; all is well; and that quickens my heart.   

1) LA JETÉE (France, 1962)

Enfin, j'ai vu LA JETÉE with a very appreciative audience of Chris Marker's friends on December 1st, at the Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley. Shot at an airport in France, it screened as part of the series "At Jetty's End: A Tribute to Chris Marker, 1921–2012." This slide-show inspired film appears to be entirely still except for a single eye-opening moment. It's short narrative invokes Proust, is poetic and unforgettable, inspiring other, longer remakes such as Terry Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS (1995). For members of the audience, it was a chance to memorialize Marker and reminisce publicly about his quirky brilliance. LA JETÉE was only one of the films by or about Marker that were featured in the series. Time travel to the PFA and see it again; it'll reset your inner pace-maker.

2) HIGH TREASON (UK, 1929)

In keeping with the theme of time travel and airports, futuristic Bowie-esque costumes fly high in this late 20s revolt, in which a flapper sheathed in silver lamé teleconferences, with deft musical accompaniment by Peter Chapman. It screened on February 24th at the Pacific Film Archive, in Berkeley, part of "Dizzy Heights: Silent Cinema and Life in the Air," curated by Patrick Ellis. Due to their mold-breaking magical and humbling artistic qualities, memories of this series in particular got me through last year's recovery.

3) MYSTERY OF THE EIFFEL TOWER (France, 1927)

Also zooming in on "Dizzy Heights," this madcap silent screened on February 25 at the Pacific Film Archive with live musical accompaniment by Ralph Carney and Serious Jass Project. Carney's strange muttering vocalizations elevated the audience. Who doesn't enjoy simulations of fighting crime while also climbing the Tour Eiffel with a bird's-eye view of Paris? Porquois pas? I'd see it again.

4) BREAD, LOVE, AND DREAMS (Italy, 1953)

On August 11th at the Pacific Film Archive, BREAD, LOVE, AND DREAMS, screened as part of the series "Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen," a painterly blending of comedy, historic-fiction, romance, and realism. Some of the films cheerleaders include those viewers who enjoy seeing Gina Lollobrigida dressed in strategically torn rags. While beautiful, there's much more than just the fleshy kind of Bellissima in Luigi Comencini's rough-hewn comedy.

5) THE LEOPARD (Italy, 1963)

Another on the 2012 list that has been called Proustian by critics and one that could be included in a list about spanning time, this epic and historic novel of a film screened on July 13th at the Pacific Film Archive. Its use of CinemaScope and its physical realism broadened the range of what a wide-angle story could encompass, literally and figuratively. Even aristocrats get covered in a thick coating of dust while traveling, the nouveau-riche laugh loudly in the face of the aging monied classes; idealists turn fickle when the tide of politics shifts; the young dance on while the once-young face old age, sickness, and death. The 186-minute restored print probably beats any shorter cuts. This Visconti should be made a part of the PFA's permanent collection if it isn't already. It's a museum-worthy masterpiece.

6) ROME, OPEN CITY (Italy, 1945)

The Guardian UK named it among "the best action and war films of all time" and "Rossellini's neorealism masterpiece." Anna Magnani brings warmth, humanity, and her signature melodrama to the crumbling post-war streetscape setting of this low budget Guernica. Co-written by Fellini, employing non-professional actors and refugees in an actual post-war setting, this film was built brick-by-brick out of ruins and those whose lives were ruined. It feels handmade and thoughtfully-crafted, even as it aims its projection towards a documentary or newsreel-consuming audience.  According to James Quandt, Rossellini called neorealism, “fiction that becomes more real than reality.” It screened on July 25th at the PFA in Berkeley.  

7) BOBBY (India, 1973)

BOBBY and AWAARA (1951), both directed by Raj Kapoor, were my two favorites of the Raj Kapoor series at the PFA in Berkeley. BOBBY screened on August 11th. I'd been awaiting my first film featuring Dimple Kapadia. Yes, that's her name. After watching this gloriously restored 35mm print, I thought perhaps Wes Anderson was influenced by Kapoor, especially by BOBBY. Not well-known in the States, it was apparently a huge hit at the time in India. I consider it a gateway genre film that will properly launch a viewer in the direction of more contemporary Bollywood. If you make it through all the costume changes, far-reaching geographic leaps, musical interruptions, and the film's colorful tonal range, you can handle anything later Bollywood hurls at you. It's been described as a candy-colored, swinging-60s fairytale. It's the most dizzying film on my list, beating out all of the silents from the "Dizzy Heights" series. Similar in its blissfully stylized staging to a film mentioned earlier, HIGH TREASON, AWAARA was also fantastic, with its own leaps into vertiginous territory, especially, as J. Hoberman notes, in terms of space-age set design. AWAARA screened on July 28th.

8) L'AMORE (Italy, 1948)

Screened on August 10th at the PFA in Berkeley, part of "Bellissima: Leading Ladies of the Italian Screen," L'AMORE is a two-part film, the Italian original showing the Cocteau-inspired portion before the darkly comic virgin-birth segment. The films aren't always presented in this order: the dramatic meditation on Anna Magnani's face as she argues with her absent lover over the phone coming first (A HUMAN VOICE), followed by Magnani playing a spiritual goat-herd who believes she's been impregnated by a charismatic biblical figure she meets on the trail (THE MIRACLE). Talk about dizzy heights, I don't know which is more wrenching: Magnani running up and down the cliffs to escape ridicule and seek salvation as the impoverished and mentally-challenged town fool raped by the false St. Joseph (played by Fellini who also co-wrote the script) or Bellissima's tears running up and down the cliffs and valleys of her face as she tears at her bed sheets for the camera.

9) PANDORA'S BOX (Germany, 1929)

On July 15th, looking forward to seeing a recently-restored print at the SF Silent Film Festival, accompanied by the Matti Bye Ensemble, I found 1400 people still standing in line 45 minutes after the listed start time. Some were standing in silence. Most were grumbling. It turns out it was worth the wait to be greeted by a gorgeous, legendary, frame-by-frame digitally-restored print. Nothing could be more classic, with live music both grounding, well-integrated with the action, and other-worldly. A fellow festival-goer @kurtiss tweeted: "Starting to think Pandora’s Box will be opened before the doors to The Castro’s house are." Louise Brooks in the prime of her career as Lulu shut that complaining and chaos down once the film was finally rolling.

10) TIME REGAINED (France, Italy, Portugal, 1999)

On March 18th, prior to heading to the PFA, I tweeted: "I hope my vision clears up in time to watch Raúl Ruiz's TIME REGAINED (1999) at 6pm. It did, and it gives me another opportunity to mention Proust. The film is an adaptation of the final episode of "In Search of Lost Time" and was included in the series, "The Library Lover: The Films of Raúl Ruiz." The time spent watching this film can never be regained, but the way it has framed my memory of last year can never be lost, a year in which I was dazed and frozen by flashes of light, and nurtured by periods of darkness and silence. Like Proust, Ruiz passed on leaving us with his biography, his known memories, his unknown memories, his labyrinthine imagination, and his games and puzzles.

Adam Hartzell on Warrior Boyz

"Film Festival Smackdown" - that's Michael Hawley's budding meme coined for the surfeit of special film screening events here on Frisco Bay in November, which he has admirably attempted to cover in this roundup. Rather than looking at this logjam of festivals as something intimidating, I hope local cinephiles feel comfortable sampling the selections like attendees at an overstuffed thanksgiving of diverse goodness. Take a healthy helping of ethnic appetizers from Latin America, Italy, indigenous North American communities, etc. Select main courses from the substantial offerings from the latest Pacific Film Archive or Stanford Theatre calendars. Wash it down with something from the Prime Pacino '71-75 series at the Castro, and enjoy some animation or "CineKink" for dessert. Or switch up the order of your cinematic meal- it all ends up in the same place, in this case not the stomach but a brain and heart well-nourished by the effects of art and culture.

One of the festivals opening tonight is the Frisco-wide favorite 3rd i International South Asian Film Festival, expanded to four days including two at the Roxie and two at the Castro. Both Hawley and Frako Loden have filed previews of the festival for The Evening Class, and now I'm proud to present Adam Hartzell's take on a 3rd i film called Warrior Boyz, screening tomorrow at the Roxie Theatre. Be sure to check out Hartzell's sf360 preview of Taiwan Film Days, a San Francisco Film Society-sponsored festival opening opening tomorrow at the Opera Plaza Cinema. Adam:

I think it’s is fair to say that, in the mind of the average U.S. citizen, Canada is seen as a Liberal oasis (or, depending on your political predilection, ‘nightmare’). As someone more oasis-leaning, I find much to admire about Canada. But as I’ve done more and more reading of and listening to Canadian media, I’ve found much to nudge away ever so slightly whatever naïve views I previously held about our neighbors to the north.

Ali Kazimi’s documentary Continuous Journey was perhaps my first big oasis evaporator. That documentary was about the Komagata Maru, a ship of 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, who as British subjects had every right to settle anywhere in the Empire, were denied entry in Canada and forced to stay in Vancouver Bay for several days while court hearings considered their plight. The film exposed me to Canada’s history of racism, a different image from the multicultural apex I was imagining Canada to be at the time. (In 2006, it was announced that Deepa Mehta was scheduled to make a fictional film about the tragedy, casting Akshay Kumar in the lead role in 2008.)

Similarly, if Bowling for Columbine had you thinking violence was only something Canadians experienced from watching U.S. television shows and movies (shows and movies filled with Canadian actors and filmed in Canadian locales hidden as U.S. cities), Warrior Boyz will have you recasting your Canadian (national) character as well. Like Continuous Journey, it’s a documentary about Sikh-Canadians that is the impetus of this adjustment of Canada as a country.

I had heard about the gang problems in the Sikh-Canadian community of Surrey, British Columbia through an interview with the director of Warrior Boyz on Q - The Podcast on the CBC and an article in The Walrus magazine. Both had me anxious to see this documentary, so I was happy that the folks at 3rd i have brought it to us. (They will also be bringing Director Baljit Sangra to discuss the film after the screening.) The film primarily follows four real-life characters, a Vice Principal and a former gang member each on personal crusades to keep kids from joining gangs or helping them find a way out, and two gang members of polar trajectories. It’s not a brilliant documentary, but it is decidedly engaging, particularly when the former gang member reveals his motivations for joining the gang. He didn’t fall into it like in so many after-school specials. He actively sought his way into gang life. Thankfully, he actively sought his way out before he died.

As powerful is the one active gang member’s inability to look into the camera throughout the documentary. When we first meet him, his accidental gaze at the lens, and by extension us, is the only time he startles, running away from the returned gaze of the camera. It is the strongest statement of all about the paradoxes of gang life. It gives him a confidence that hides the insecurity still visible in his inability to make eye contact with his imagined audience, his existential jury. Even more topical with the recent attack on Jagdish Grewal, an editor of a Punjabi newspaper in Brampton, Ontario, this documentary definitely brings a third eye to an oft-filmed topic, demonstrating the tremendous value festivals like 3rd i consistently provide.

Adam Hartzell: A Little Knowledge Can Be a Suspenseful Thing

Greetings from Portland, Oregon! I've been sampling films at the Portland International Film Festival, and visiting with family and friends. I even got to meet one of the bloggers I most admire, Thom of Film of the Year, who has vividly recreated our encounter here. Thanks, Thom! Now, as I wait for the beginning of an Oscar party I'm attending this evening, I have a few spare moments to work on Hell on Frisco Bay. With Oscars in mind, I'd like to mention that The Daily Plastic, online home to a couple of Chicago's finest film writers, Robert Davis and J. Robert Parks, has been kind enough to publish a piece I wrote on the first-ever Academy Awards, announced February 1929. Last weekend's presentation of Sunrise at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival's special Valentine's Day event was preceded by a slide show I prepared on the same topic.

But I'm especially excited to present a piece by Adam Hartzell on the inter-cultural content of one of the key front-runners at this year's awards ceremony, Slumdog Millionaire. If you have not seen the film yet and don't want surprises robbed from you, please refrain from reading. If you have however, I think you'll be interested to read what Adam has to say, no matter what you think of the film:

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Cricket is a game many make fun of in the United States. Some time ago, I decided to stop making fun of sports I don’t fully understand, just as I decided to stop ridiculing music genres that provide no inspiration for me. In fact, when traveling abroad, I try to acclimate myself to local sports cultures by reading what I can and asking the locals about their loyalties and passion for their games. I have tossed aside the snarky comments of my youth and replaced them with curious inquiries about other athletic pursuits. So when my work brought me close enough to the Antipodes where the trip to Australia and New Zealand wasn’t obnoxiously long, I decided it was finally time for me to learn “the game of eleven fools”. (That’s not me being snarky, it’s George Bernard Shaw speaking of the game lovingly, I think.)

Cricket is a tough game for someone like me reared on baseball to understand. When discussing the rules that pertain to a batsman and/or explaining how runs can be scored, I keep coming from a baseball reference point that only seems to confuse me more than help. I won’t go into trying to explain the intricacies of a cricket match here because I’m limited in my own overview and such a wide description is unnecessary to this essay anyway. For those interested, I suggest checking out Harry Ricketts’ How to Catch a Cricket Match, part of the fantastic Ginger Series (so much more respectful a name than the For Dummies or Idiot’s Guide series) published by AWA Press in New Zealand. I picked this book up while in New Zealand during the Cricket World Cup in 2007. The Cricket World Cup wasn’t happening in New Zealand. It was taking place in the West Indies. But every shop with a TV had the matches on. So there were ample opportunities for me to watch and learn while having a flat white at an Esquires Coffee House (actually a Canadian chain) in Auckland or a pint of Tui at a pub in Wellington.

One way to acclimate towards an unfamiliar sport is to latch on to a sporting celebrity. As David Beckham has done for those in the States trying to acclimate to what people in the U.S. (and Australia and Canada) call soccer, the player of the moment for me to identify with the sport of cricket was, and likely still is, Australian Ricky Ponting. One of the things I do when I travel is buy jerseys from the teams of the towns I visit. When in Australia for the first time, I purchased a Ricky Ponting jersey. Whereas the true football fan might look disapprovingly at those wearing Beckham jerseys, considering such people posers, I’m not sure if cricket fanatics feel suspect of my traipsing around in the sport celebrity of the moment’s jersey. I think cricket fans are just happy to see a Yankee try to understand the joy fans find from cricket. My knowledge is limited, but I feel as if I’ve picked up enough to enjoy the game now. I don’t have the stamina to enjoy a whole match, but I can discern the actions beneficial to each team. I am not like the language learner laughing with the locals a tell-tale second too late. I reacted with the crowd watching the telly, rising up to spill my tall black in perfect time with the proper defensive play.

So when I went into Loveleen Tandan and Danny Boyle’s film Slumdog Millionaire, I arguably had more cricket knowledge than the average United States American. Because of this, I feel I experienced a layer of tactical trickery that most of my fellow citizens did not.

Brian has properly alerted you to spoilers, so you either know the pivotal scene about which I'm speaking, or, like me, you don't need to maintain ignorance of plot points to enjoy a film. The scene I'm referring to is when the game show host presents Jamal with a cricket-related question. I don't remember the exact question, but it has to do with who has the most 'centuries' ever in the sport. A 'century' is when a single batsman acquires at least 100 runs in his innings for a particular match. ("Innings" can be singular or plural in cricket.) Again, I don't remember all four answers offered, but B is Ricky Ponting and D is Jack Hobbs. Before the answers were reduced to just those two (if I remember that properly too), I remember leaning over to my wife and the friends who were with us and whispering 'It's Ricky Ponting.' Yes, I was trying to impress my wife and my friends by dropping some heavy cricket knowledge. When the choices were reduced to B-Ricky Ponting and D-Jack Hobbs, a commercial break is imposed and Jamal and host venture off for a pee break.

It is here where the host appears to assist Jamal when he writes the supposed answer on the wall, or mirror as it may, telling Jamal to choose B-Ricky Ponting. It is here where I believe I was fooled more than most US viewers because my limited cricket knowledge is tied too dependently to Ponting. I thought the host was truly Jamal's buddy, not because of character development, but because I thought I knew the correct answer. In fact, we later learn that the host was assuming Jamal would trust him. The host was attempting to exploit this non-existent trust. The host was letting his competitive and classist demons get the best of him, while Jamal was void of any similar ambitions. Yet, my limited knowledge leading me to be incorrectly led by the guest host reveals an even more devious underlying plan by the host. The host assumed a young man such as Jamal would only have a contemporary knowledge of cricket and not know that the elder statesman Jack Hobbs, aka Sir John Berry Hobbs, was the true holder of the record. I was tricked by the host due to the very assumption he made of Jamal. Such added to the suspense of the scene for me, thus adding to the surprise, thus adding to the elation when Jamal picks the correct answer by countering the guest host’s tactic. The scene still works for those completely ignorant of cricket, and it works on a different level for those well-versed in the history of the game. But I feel like my incomplete knowledge of cricket led me to layers of intrigue within the scene unavailable to those with a perfect knowledge or a complete lack of knowledge. I thought he was helping Jamal because I was naively confident in my knowledge. I was more naïve than Jamal. I was the impressionable Jamal the host thought Jamal was. Talk about breaking the boundary of the fourth wall.

The unpredictable knowledge demonstrated in dialogue and character in this scene underscores the unpredictable knowledge of the international viewer, exhibit A - myself. This is very much what adds to the pleasure of globe-traveling cinema for those of us who travel to see it. If Tandan and Boyle had a US audience in mind, they’d likely have ditched the cricket question, since our batsman pad themselves with steroids not tea. That, or else their producers or other movie company honchos would have demanded it be stricken from the record. Whereas, if I had come to the theatre with the typical US sports provincialism our media encourages by ignoring any sporting tradition outside of the USA, I wouldn’t have found that scene as utterly mesmerizing, as so intricately layered, as I did. And as I still do. My limited knowledge is what led me to not just enjoy that scene, but to freaking love that scene!

My experience with the events of that scene reinforced for me how globalization is too often too simply discussed. As films travel across the world, they run up against an unintended audience’s incomplete knowledge and the stories become different experiences for each individual viewer. Slumdog Millionaire is just another opportunity for the global to be localized within the reflexive contexts of the experiences of each individual audience member. Each audience member part of the local and global simultaneously.

Adam Hartzell: Melody Gilbert at DocFest

More festivals keep coming to Frisco Bay. Latest to be announced is 3rd i's San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival, expanded to four days (November 13-16) with Indian Subcontinental-related films of just about every imaginable type: including silent classic (1929's a Throw of Dice), Bollywood crowd-pleaser (Om Shanti Om), Shakespeare adaptation (Maqbool), sleeper Oscar contender (Slumdog Millionaire), and Pakistani zombie movie (Hell's Ground). The only thing that seems to be missing is, oh, maybe an animated feature based on the Ramayana- and another festival the same weekend's got that. The San Francisco Film Society's third annual Animation Festival opens November 13th with Nina Paley's Sita Sings the Blues, which has previously played locally only in an unfinished version. The weekend at the Embarcadero includes dozens of animated shorts and features from around the world.

Well, with that jam-packed paragraph out of the way, what I'm really here to do is introduce a piece by my good friend Adam Hartzell on the films of Melody Gilbert, whose documentaries are being featured at IndieFest's annual documentary showcase, opening tonight at the Roxie cinema. Her films will be shown there October 24-26, and will be accompanied by an in-person chat on the afternoon of October 25th. Here's Adam:

The San Francisco Documentary Film Festival, which begins this weekend, is featuring the director of two films that had a tremendous effect on me when I saw them at previous SF DocFests. The director is Melody Gilbert and the two films are Whole and A Life Without Pain, part of a retrospective of Gilbert’s work at this year’s festival. Whole is a film about a tiny demographic – people who strongly desire the loss of a limb, a condition I was first introduced to through a captivating essay in The Atlantic Monthly. Gilbert documents the dreams and fears and humanity of people, disparagingly called 'amputee wannabes', who struggle with an obsession truly bizarre to the majority of us. Their obsession to have a leg or arm removed is so intense, some go to such extreme efforts as placing their leg in dry ice or laying a leg along railroad tracks in order to bring their desires to fruition. The title's obvious irony is that these individuals will not feel 'whole' until part of their body has been removed. The topic is striking on its own, but considering the idiosyncratic and disconcerting desires of her subjects, the fact that Gilbert is able to craft empathic connections between the audience and her subjects more than justifies Gilbert receiving the SF DocFest’s inaugural Someone To Watch award. Rather than take the easy comedic route with this topic that a lesser documentary would, Gilbert challenges our weathered cynicism, provincial worldviews, and hardened morals to connect with populations difficult to engage, while reserving judgment as the responsibility of the viewer and those viewed.

Gilbert’s A Life Without Pain takes us into another irony, the agony of being someone who cannot experience physical pain, and how the trials of such lives touch those who love them. Gilbert follows three children with congenital anesthesia, a condition where the body does not feel physical pain, and explores how these children and their families cope with such a unique condition. Gilbert quickly introduces us to the severe adjustments these kids and families need to make. One child must wear goggles to avoid further damaging her retinas from having no pain cues to stop her from scratching. A Norwegian girl’s adventurous nature requires bi-weekly check-ups with the doctor since her body won’t announce a broken bone through pain. And a German girl shares how school bullies have literally taken her on as a personal punching bag. Even if she feels no physical pain, emotional pain persists. Much could be metaphor-ed about the painful pain-free existence of these children, but Gilbert always keeps us grounded in the actual real lives of the children, refusing to let the metaphors replace the human beings. (The Elephant Man could have just as likely screamed "I am not a metaphor!") And since these are documentaries made with television in mind, Gilbert also refuses the pity or 'supercrip' narratives that the TV medium too often demands, by instead having the children and families in A Life Without Pain well anchored in their agency. (I don’t know if Gilbert is influenced by Martin F. Norden’s excellent critique of disabled characters in film, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies, but you can tell that I sure am.)

Based on my positive receptions of Whole and A Life Without Pain, the film I am most anxious to see at this year’s SF DocFest is Gilbert’s Urban Explorers: Into the Darkness. Similar to my motivation to check out Whole, I am excited to see Urban Explorers after reading about 'Urban Archaeology' in an issue of my favorite magazine, Spacing, a Canadian publication focusing on public space issues. I anticipate that we will witness city spelunkers diving into sewer tunnels or Urbana Joneses venturing into factory buildings vacated by dead-beat corporations to see what abandoned artifacts and forgotten histories might be found in such modern day pyramids. These urban archaeologists are part of a larger movement of collectives, e.g., Guerilla Gardeners, Critical Mass, and Parkour Traceurs, embracing public space while also challenging the boundaries of what is public or private as a form of resistance in a time when so much of our public space is being usurped by economically-restrictive private institutions. I am curious if Gilbert will explore these public space issues, bringing up how these urban excursions allow for a more intimate connection with our cities and by extension our fellow citizens. I don’t know if Gilbert will address those topics, but considering how much her previous documentaries have stayed with me when I first watched them at past SF DocFests, I’m sure I will have a repeat performance of experience at this year’s SF DocFest.

SFFS Screen at the Kabuki

I finally made it to a film at the Sundance Kabuki's SFFS Screen- the San Francisco Film Society's dedicated venue for year-round bookings of festival-style films with very limited commercial potential but high aesthetic merit. Though the films have distributors they might well have bypassed Frisco Bay theatrical runs were it not for these (generally) week-long bookings in the smallest house in Japantown's recently-remodeled octoplex. I still haven't figured out how to predict the Kabuki's new pricing system with its somewhat confusing amenities fees -- my reserved-seating ticket cost $9, which was a little less than I had expected for a Tuesday night. I think weekend shows cost more, and matinées a bit less.

The film I saw was the Forsaken Land, a prize-winner from the 2005 Cannes Film Festival that I'd missed at the 3rd i South Asian Film Festival a couple years back. I'd never seen a film from Sri Lanka before now, and though I'm not sure how much this one told me about the country that I hadn't somehow gleaned from geography books, news reports and travelers' tales already, it was certainly very beautiful, if bleak. Set around a country dwelling in a region of strong winds, tall grasses, thin foliage and an ever-present military, the Forsaken Land eminates sexuality, danger, and the wearing-down of human bodies in the face of daily hardship, all in an austere, nearly-wordless style that may seem to familiar to viewers of past SFIFF films like Los Muertos and Blissfully Yours. And though director Vimukthi Jayasundara often may seem more like a borrower from those films or others than a presenter of a strikingly original aesthetic, he nonetheless has captured some unforgettable moments in his camera.

One favorite shot shows a woman, who we have just watched being rubbed up against by a sexual predator on a packed bus ride, enter her home and collapse supine on her bed, as if in agony from the travails of her routine. The camera's position at the head of the bed hides her face and emphasizes her elbows and knees, all of which point to the ceiling in a defensive position like a porcupine's spines. Another set of shots captures a young girl going out into the road during the onset of afternoon rain, the light from the sky transforming the grass into a rainbow of yellows, browns and greens. If you're at all interested in films that pack a visual wallop and that sparsely portion out their narrative beats, you really ought to see Jayasundara's film in a cinematic setting.

The Forsaken Land plays through August 14th at the Kabuki. Future SFFS Screen offerings include the documentary Hats Off August 22-28, the Italian film Days and Clouds August 29 through September 4, Germany's Yella September 5-11, the magical-realist, Kazakhstan-set Wind Man September 12-18, and both Youssou N'Dour: Return to Gorée and Opera Jawa beginning September 19th. I'm not sure if the latter two opening the same day means there will be two SFFS Screens for a week, or if they'll share the same screen and alternate showtimes, but I do know that the Indonesian musical phantasmagoria Opera Jawa was one of my favorite films seen in 2007, and I'm very glad to get another chance to see it in a cinema. It's one I'll be recommending to friends both in and out of cinephile circles.