The Milk of Sorrow
Director: Claudia Llosa, DP: Natasha Braier
Around a Small Mountain (2009)
Director: Jacques Rivette, DP: Irina Lubtchansky
The final film from French New Wave pioneer Jacques Rivette concerns the ineffable interplay between life and performance.
Photographed by Irina Lubtchansky in the open-air splendor of the south of France, it revolves around an Italian flaneur (Sergio Castellitto) who is drawn into the world of a traveling circus led by Kate (Jane Birkin), whose enigmatic past is a mystery he is determined to solve.
Rivette’s film is a fitting swan song to a glorious career by the least known (in the US) director of the New Wave, compared to Godard, Truffaut, Resnais and Rohmer.
Director: Eliza Hittman, DP: Hélène Louvart
Hittman follows up to her debut, It Felt Like Love, is a coming of age tale of a youngster grappling with his sexual anxieties.
Frankie (Harris Dickinson), a bored teenager living in South Brooklyn, regularly haunts the Coney Island boardwalk with his boys—trying to score weed, flirting with girls, killing time. But he spends his late nights in the world of online cruising, connecting with older men and exploring the desires he harbors but doesn’t yet fully understand.
Sensuously lensed on 16mm by cinematographer Hélène Louvart, Beach Rats depicts a vibrantly colorful sub-culture seldom shown with such honesty on the big screen.
Shown in New Directors/New Films
A Neon release.
Director/DP: Kirsten Johnson
Kirsten Johnson’s work as a director of photography and camera operator has helped earn her documentary collaborators (Laura Poitras, Michael Moore, Kirby Dick, Barbara Kopple) many awards, including the Oscars.
In Cameraperson, Johnson offers a visceral and vibrant self-portrait of an artist who has traveled the globe, venturing into various landscapes and lives.
Shown in New Directors/New Films
Director: Ryan Coogler, DP: Maryse Alberti
Michael B. Jordan’s Adonis Johnson, Apollo Creed’s son, who sets out to prove he’s got what it takes to be the next champ, leaving his luxe L.A. life behind to train in the gyms of Philadelphia with Rocky himself.
After the breakout success of Fruitvale Station, director Ryan Coogler shows facility for mainstream sports film, defined by a poignant portrait of intergenerational friendship and offering Stallone his best role in decades.
Maryse Alberti’s dazzling cinematography is manifest in a four-and-a-half minute fight sequence that unfolds in one breathless take.
Directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering, DP: Kirsten Johnson
Postmodern intellectual Jacques Derrida is the star of this self-reflexive, playful, and probing documentary.
Directors: Kirby Dick & Amy Ziering, DP: Kirsten Johnson
Framed by the French philosopher’s statements about the inherent unreliability of biography, the docu attempts to show links between Derrida’s radically influential thinking and his own personal life.
Kirsten Johnson’s attentive camera captures revealing flashes of the man behind the ideas.
Director: Robin Campillo, DP: Jeanne Lapoirie
Jeanne Lapoirie’s camera follows the men who loiter around the Gare du Nord train station in Paris as they scrape by however they can, forming gangs for support and protection, ever fearful of being caught by the police and deported.
When the middle-aged Daniel (Olivier Rabourdin) approaches a handsome Ukrainian for a date, he learns the young man is willing to do anything for cash. What Daniel intends only as sex-for-hire begets a home invasion and then an unexpectedly relationship. The different circumstances of the two men’s lives reveal hidden facets of Paris.
Presented in four parts, this absorbing film by Robin Campillo (BPM: Beats Per Minute) is centered around relationships that defy easy categorization, in which motivations and desires are not understood even by those who participate in them.
Director: Michel Gondry, DP: Ellen Kuras
The feverish imaginations of DIY surrealist Michel Gondry and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman kick into overdrive for the sci-fi romance. When nice guy dweeb Joel (Jim Carrey) encounters blue-haired spitfire Clementine (Kate Winslet) on the LIRR, there’s 0attraction, but also familiarity; as if they’ve met before.
Ellen Kuras’ high-contrast handheld camerawork enhances the sense of disorientation in this parable about love and loss.
