It is interesting to note that Nornes creates a distinction between the genesis of Ogawa Pro and that of his Iwanami contemporary, Tsuchimoto Noriaki's independent film production studio (Tsuchimoto had shot the highly influential series of films on Minamata and the long-term effects of industrial pollution on its residents), citing Tsuchimoto's seminal role in the formation of Zengakuren at Waseda University in 1948 as a prelude to his career in activist filmmaking, suggesting that Ogawa's career trajectory was as equally influenced by cultural and political synchronicity as it was by a desire to exert creative independence.

This confluence is perhaps best exemplified by the Sanrizuka series that documented the local farmers' protracted (and ultimately, failed) struggle against the construction of the Narita Airport. Far from facile attributions of tradition versus modernity, Nornes incisively places their struggle within the broader context of hegemony, nationhood, and cultural identity (the need for a second airport near Tokyo was essentially created by the US military as part of enforcing the ANPO security treaty, and their struggle became emblematic of the broader resistance to the treaty itself and its implication of the Vietnam War, attracting student activists to their cause). Having lived in the village and learning their way of life over the course of several years, Ogawa not only eschews the myth of objectivity in shooting a documentary, but also redefines the concept of embededness as a means of engaging with the subject. By differentiating between the converging factions at Sanrizuka, Nornes proposes that series' final installment, Sanrizuka: Heta Village is also its most potent and well-realized film specifically because it transcends political immediacy, dissolving the notion of otherness to create a cultural portrait that is both tactile and ephemeral:

Heta Village represents a climax to the Sanrizuka Series and a keystone to Ogawa's career because the director finally perfected the documentary aesthetic he had been searching for. Before this, he conducted his search - his practical experiments with all their theoretical implications - while necessarily tending to the practical and on-the-ground politics of the struggle. Only by staying with his taisho [subject] for so many years, by following their struggle and living with them as neighbors, did Ogawa reach a point where he could shuttle the spectacle and details of the political struggle to offscreen spaces without committing an unforgivable ethical compromise. Those years of living and filmmaking enabled the collective to see beyond the urgent contingencies of the confrontation with power and reach for a more profound understanding of the conflict that continued in the fields of Sanrizuka and the jails of Narita. As filmmakers, they built this new understanding into their cinema. Sanrizuka: Heta Village is ultimately about - and literally embodies - the diverse ways of being human.

Ogawa's ability to disengage from the political dimension of "activist" filmmaking is also reflected in his decision (spurred in part by personal anxieties) to relocate Ogawa Pro from Sanrizuka to Magino, a remote village on the brink of extinction where the remaining members retreated to a life of farming rice and silkworms and compiling almanacs - a move that, as Nornes argues, exposes an underlying dichotomy in the regressive social attitudes within the organization that contributed to the attrition (especially with respect to the women's roles, often remaining uncredited in the films and being relegated to performing housework in the commune):

In retrospect, it would appear that the critiques of the Old Left were an honest attempt to renovate the relationship between art and politics but without substantially rethinking social politics. Indeed, looking at the way Ogawa Pro actually functioned, it was obviously an autarchy. For all the rhetoric about collective production, there was a crystal clear hierarchy with Ogawa in the unquestioned seat of power. The structure was relatively faint during the Sanrizuka Series, but after 1975 and the move to Magino, the isolation amplified the hierarchical roles. Those who could not keep up with the debate were swiftly purged. This structure may also be seen as an analog of the nation-state itself. The authoritarianism that all these factors point to may have left Japanese critical theory and documentary filmmaking of the early 1970s an inflexible discourse incapable of meeting the challenges of a social world undergoing massive change.

As Nornes further argues, Ogawa's increasing preoccupation with the daily rituals in the farming village (perhaps exacerbated by Magino's isolation) serves as a broader reflection of his disconnection from film as a vehicle for social change towards film as an art form, a paradigm that would supplant activist cinema as the preferred mode of expression by a new generation of filmmakers such as Naomi Kawase. In this sense, the Magino series not only reflected Ogawa's exhaustion from political engagement, but was also a symptom of the collapsing movement itself:

Ogawa Pro was not isolated from the changes that were transforming Japanese documentary from a collective spirit to a private film. And neither were the farming communities isolated from the urban filmmaking centers. Indeed, these sweeping changes in Japanese society deeply affected the filmmaking of Ogawa Pro's Magino period.

...This was, after all, precisely the time of Japan's bubble economy and farmers were quite well off (especially in contrast to the hard case poverty of Ogawa Pro). Farmers were enjoying a measure of prosperity, a participation in the fruits of modernity to a degree never experienced in the past. The Magino Village they portrayed on film was primarily one of Ogawa's own prodigious imagination. The film was widely criticized for this, especially in the hinterlands. The Sundial Carved with a Thousand Years of Notches was made at the end of an era; it is a film that could never be made today. As Iizuka Toshio points out, the people that really loved the film were - like Ogawa himself - lovers of the cinema, not the village.

Resnais is fascinated by mental or subjective images, the virtual reality which makes up individual consciousness and is itself composed of both what we have known and what we have imagined. This interest in the finest workings of the mind - in the mind itself as an internal cinema where images both virtual and real coexist - calls for an extraordinary reshaping of cinema and rethinking of the capacity of film to show us reality as it is imagined, as well as lived.

Beginning with an analysis of Resnais's short film documentaries from 1948 to 1958 - which range from such seemingly diverse subjects as artist profile (Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin) art (Guernica), culture (Les Statues meurent aussi), the Holocaust (Nuit et brouillard), the national library system (Toute la mémoire du monde), and polystyrene manufacturing (Le Chant du Styrène) - Wilson argues that the documentaries are integrally connected by the idea of (re)animation. In Guernica, the fragmentation of the painting reflects the inadequacy of representing collective trauma that foreshadows Hiroshima mon amour. In Nuit et brouillard, the juxtaposition of photographic stills with film footage creates ambiguity between life and death that, in turn, evokes the tragedy of the concentration camps. In Les Statues meurent aussi, the film is less a survey of African art than a reflection on cultural phantoms that have been lost in the face of colonialism and commercialization.

The death of statues is illustrated also in the opening images of the film where we see statues from western art, fragmented, the title seeming to refer to a Proustian sense of the friability of even hard matter, through time. In both motifs in the film, statues are rendered peculiarly animate (in particular, in Resnais’s moving shots which circle the material objects). Resnais introduces this uncanny theme of hesitation between life and death, flesh and stone, which will recur in his films as he shows ash-covered figures in Hiroshima, statues and shadows at Marienbad. In Les Statues meurent aussi, this material concern shadows the more trenchant awareness of the loss and embalming of a living civilization.

Moreover, in highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the living and inanimate in Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson introduces the idea of dislocating trauma from a specific, personal (and cultural) level towards a more amorphous, collective consciousness that runs through Resnais's films, a theme that is also captured in her analysis of Toute la mémoire du monde :

In Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais propagates a notion of collective memory, of a ‘mémoire universelle’. He shows, obliquely how the shots of his own films are always already familiar, part of this cultural meting-pot or memory bank. His films will recall torture scenes in Goya, the bodily horror of passages in Kafka. His will be a collaged art, glimpsed first by a wider public as he edits together Van Gogh, pursued in the editing of Guernica and Nuit et brouillard. Resnais's response to the traumas of the twentieth-century history is particular: he recognizes the fear of forgetting, the blow dealt to memory, yet retains and refuses to relinquish the resonances of art, literature and popular culture, the fabric from which cultural memory is continually re-shaped.

In the chapter on Hiroshima mon amour, Wilson insightfully argues that the dislocation is manifested in Resnais's films through cities that are as equally identifiable through images of iconic sites as they are interchangeable in their representations of urban spaces. In Hiroshima mon amour, the A-bomb dome is juxtaposed against the city's rebuilt commercial district, creating parallel strands of time that mirror the protagonist's unreconciled personal and collective memories of Nevers and Hiroshima.

Similarly, Boulogne and Algeria are also integrally connected in Muriel ou le temps d'un retour through suppressed personal and collective trauma, an intrinsic violence that Wilson proposes is revealed through Resnais's jarring editing and soundtrack that reinforce the atrocity of the Algerian War through the film's idiosyncratic aesthetic of "visual mutilation".

In her essay on L’Année dernière à Marienbad, Wilson provides an insightful analysis on the implication of Resnais's creative disagreement with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet over his decision not to film the climactic rape sequence and instead, culminate the scene with a repeating shot of A opening her arms to X. While on the surface, the substitution radically transforms A's station from victim to liberated woman, Wilson argues that the action is ambiguous and unsettling, implying a dark psychology more in-line with folie à deux than feminist icon:

For me, there is no liberation in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, thought here may be an act of transgression, and movement into the unknown. What is radical about the film is not the liberation of A, about which I am doubtful, but its gradual intimation that she, like the heroine of Hiroshima mon amour may seek a love which devours and deforms her, that she may be an actor and not an object in the relation that is generation by the dialogue between lovers. This is disturbing to X, disrupting his authorship, letting him be fantasized as rapist by his lover. Yet it is also, surely, disturbing to A - and to the viewers - who see her participation in a fantasy by which she is destroyed.

The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
In Comparison (Harun Farocki, 2009)
Independencia (Raya Martin, 2009)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)
Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot, 2009)
Ghost Town (Zhao Dayong, 2009)
Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009
Sense of Architecture (Heinz Emigholz, 2005-2009)
Broken Embraces (Pedro Almodóvar, 2009)
The Beaches of Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)


Honorable Mentions (in alphabetical order):

Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira, 2009)
Liverpool (Lisandro Alonso, 2009)
Police, Adjective (Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009)
Wild Grass (Alain Resnais, 2009)


Close Contenders:

The Hurt Locker (Kathryn Bigelow, 2008)
Un Lac (Philippe Grandrieux, 2008)
Ne Change Rien (Pedro Costa, 2009)
Revanche (Götz Spielmann, 2008)
Sacred Places (Jean-Marie Téno, 2009)


New Discoveries:

Seventeen (Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines, 1983)
Torero (Carlos Velo, 1956)
Death on a Full Moon Day (Prasanna Vithanage, 1997)
Paria (Nicolas Klotz, 2000)
On the Passage of a Few Persons Through a Rather Brief Unity of Time (Guy Debord, 1959)

-----
Part of Senses of Cinema 2009 World Poll.

Although Duras transformed her experience into art, she did not do so by simply telling the 'story of her life', as she did not believe that the chaos of memory could or should be subjugated to the contrived order of a linear and logically structured novelistic or filmic narrative. Instead she isolated significant moments in her life and condensed them, in fictionalized form, into the recurring scenarios that run through the texts of her films. This repetition with variations of the same core material is one of the hallmarks of Duras's work, as she creates clusters of references through which texts and films mirror and transform one another.

A familiar instance of this process of fictional condensation and repetition is embodied by the recurring iconic character, Anne-Marie Stretter who appears in Duras's novels La Ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Le Vice-consul, and L'Amant, and also in her film, India Song. Inspired by Elisabeth Streidter, the wealthy, strikingly beautiful Swiss wife of a provincial administrator whose daughters were close to Duras's age (as well as the unrequited object of desire of a young man who committed suicide), Stretter not only represented the socioeconomic ideal of the colonial bourgeoisie that the Donnadieus were excluded from, but also Duras's ambivalent relationship with her mother, whose attention and devotion were largely lavished on her eldest brother, Pierre, at the expense of the younger children.

However, rather than creating fictionalized versions of autobiographical episodes, Duras emphasizes the disjunction through dissociation, desynchronization, and non-linearity, creating the aesthetic of voix off in which off-screen voices are used in lieu of synchronized sound to accompany the visual track and maintain separation between image and sound:

Duras's filmic technique, then, illustrates her view that cinema is not a transparent reflection of the world, but a highly complex construct which should be presented as such. But the gap between voice and image does more than merely show the artificial nature of cinema. It also creates an unsettling feeling of dislocation within the spectator's own sense of identity which, for the duration of the film, loses its usual cohesion and unity. Duras's films demonstrate that the notion of a stable coherent self or 'subject' is, in fact, an illusion which, in Western patriarchal cultures at least, has been used by dominant social groups to reinforce their position of power over those who have been defined as 'the object', 'the other'.

As with the fictional incarnation of Stretter, the composite autobiographical episodes from Duras's childhood would similarly form the recurring image of the beggar woman whose fictionalized biography is recounted in India Song and Son nom de Venise dan Calcutta désert: a desperate Vietnamese woman, near death, who had handed her equally gravely ill child over to Duras's mother (Duras ended up caring for the child who died a few days later), and an emaciated, screaming beggar woman known as "la folle de Vinhlong" who, for Duras, symbolized the fear of mental illness (and implicitly, the sense of helplessness) that she harbored throughout her life. But more importantly, the beggar woman also represents a stateless and disenfranchisement that expound on Duras's recurring themes of class and division, as illustrated in her transposition as a drifter in Le Camion and more loosely, by the unseen, immigrant sanitation workers who sweep the pre-dawn streets of Paris in Les Mains négatives:

The theme of racist oppression and exclusion in Le Camion is also reflected in the film's location, since the lorry's journey takes us through a region inhabited entirely by immigrants, including a large Portuguese community. As Duras explained, the latter used to live in caravans near the railway station at Plaisir, but were evicted and rehoused in the grandes ensembles, the blocks of flats which we occasionally see in the film. Exiled from their native country and subsequently excluded from mainstream French society, the immigrants are condemned to live in this desolate landscape, evoked in the text by the woman's repeated vision of 'la fin du monde', 'the end of the world'.

Indeed, inasmuch as Duras's films all contain a political dimension, Le Camion is perhaps the most overtly personal response to a political autobiography - her own estrangement from the PCF (Parti Communiste Français) - featuring a truck driver whose hardline membership in the PCF unconsciously perpetuates the artificial divisions inherent in a monolithic identity:

This denunciation of political power in Le Camion begins with Duras's vehement criticism of the PCF which can be traced back to her resignation and subsequent expulsion from the party in 1950, after her seven-year experience as a fervent activist. The sense of loss she experienced following this episode was exacerbated by the fact that for her the PCF had become a substitute family, creating a strong personal identification in addition to her political commitment.

Similarly, Nathalie Granger also represents a personal and political convergence, this time, within the context of the post 1968 French feminist movement, the publishing of the solidarity petition in Le Nouvel observateur in 1971 to protest outdated abortion laws from the 1920s, and the 1972 mass demonstrations in Paris against the trivialization of rape in the French judicial system. Citing the duality intrinsic in the women's insular environment, suggesting both imprisonment and utopia, repression and violence (reinforced through the broadcast news of escaped convicts that accompany the extended shots of domestic chores), Günther provides an insightful and exhaustive deconstruction of the film's structure and its process of illustrating, diagnosing, and finally refiguring the mechanics of social class and gender roles.

The notion of gender as performance is clearly relevant to Nathalie Granger, as Depardieu's slightly exaggerated gestures and facial expressions constantly remind us not only that he is an actor, but also that the male figure he represents is acting out the role of the salesman as part of this gendered spectacle. The sharp contrast, furthermore, between the man's initially confident performance and his subsequent vulnerability in front of the women also foregrounds this discrepancy between his spurious masculinity and the fundamental humanity he shares with Isabelle and her friend. It is evident, then, that the women's implicit violence is not directed at the man personally, but rather at a society that imposes such a rigid prescription of gendered behavior on a multitude of different individuals.

...At the end of the film then, Duras transcends the barriers of both gender and class by creating a relationship of mutual understanding between a working-class man and two middle-class women. The oppositional categories of the Symbolic order become irrelevant, as the man reconnects with his 'femininity', just as the women's anger and violence are an expression of their 'masculinity'.

Friday, 2/19
4:00 Nucingen House (Raúl Ruiz)
6:00 Accident (Soi Cheang)
8:00 Over the Edge (Jonathan Kaplan)

Saturday, 2/20
1:30 Accident
3:30 Godard Rarities (Jean-Luc Godard)
5:30 Perfect Life (Emily Tang)
7:30 Applause (Martin Zandvliet)
9:15 [Surprise Film]

Sunday, 2/21
1:00 Applause
3:00 The Revenge: A Visit from Fate (Kiroshi Kurosawa)
4:45 The Revenge: The Scar that Never Fades (Kiroshi Kurosawa)
6:30 Be Good (Sois Sage) (Juliette Garcias)
8:30 Nucingen House

Monday, 2/22
[No FCS Screenings]

Tuesday, 2/23
4:15 Be Good
6:15 Air Doll (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
8:45 Be Good

Wednesday, 2/24
4:00 Sombre (Philippe Grandrieux)
6:30 La vie nouvelle (Philippe Grandrieux)
9:00 Un lac (Philippe Grandrieux)

Thursday, 2/25
[No FCS Screenings]

Friday, 2/26
4:30 Persecution (Patrice Chéreau)
6:30 Kinatay (Brillante Mendoza)
8:40 Persecution

Saturday, 2/27
1:30 Air Doll
4:00 The Land of Madness (Luc Moullet)
6:00 Persecution
8:00 Tales from the Golden Age (Cristian Mungiu, Ioana Uricaru, Hanno Höfer, Razvan Marculescu, & Constantin Popescu)

Sunday, 2/28
1:30 A Brighter Summer Day (Edward Yang)
6:15 Be Good
8:15 Kinatay

Similar to Postmaster, the social imprinting of economics also provides the framework for the second story, Monihara, a gothic tale within a tale told by a village schoolmaster (Govinda Chakravarti) on the events that led to the haunting of a seemingly idyllic mansion across the river. Having inherited a country estate, successful businessman Phanibhushan (Kali Bannerjee) returns to his ancestral village with his attractive, commoner wife, Manimalika (Kanika Majumdar), where she is invariably visited by a desperate relative eager to exploit marginal family ties to curry favor from her husband. Manimalika's reluctant encounter with her long abandoned past provides a glimpse into her relationship with her husband as well. Childless and insecure over his wife's affection, Phanibhusan is quick to indulge her whims, lavishing her with jewelry from his many business trips over the years. It is a token affirmation that soon consumes Manimalika, a dislocated sense of adoration and loyalty that is strained when her husband is compelled to take an extended trip to stave off financial ruin, and she is faced with the possibility of losing her newfound privilege. In its critical examination of transaction as a surrogate for human connection, Monihara represents an intriguing corollary to the status of women in Postmaster. By presenting a paradigm in which social mobility is more fluid (albeit through marriage) and the balance of power is shifted, Ray illustrates the insidious - and intrinsically artificial - nature of class stratification, where the fear of erasure itself becomes a crippling, self-fulfilling prophesy.

As in Postmaster and Monihara, the final installment of Teen Kanya, entitled Samapti, also begins with a journey from the city to the province as a metaphor for reframing cultural norms from an outsider's perspective - and specifically, a modern point of view observing outmoded traditions - in this case, a recent university graduate, Amulya (Soumitra Chatterjee) who has returned home to visit his widowed mother, Jogmaya (Sita Mukherjee). From the comical opening image of Amulya falling into the mud while disembarking from a boat (after stubbornly refusing assistance from the locals) as a spirited Mrinmoyee (Aparna Sen) amusedly looks on, Ray implicitly links the two characters in their strangerness - one, a transplanted native who is no longer accustomed to the village's quaint ways; the other, a poor, displaced young woman who is too old to lead the life of a carefree child, but has also cultivated few skills to cope in a world of adults. Rejecting his mother's notions of a suitable wife - one who invariably comes from an upstanding, middle class family and is equally adept around the kitchen as she is with embroidery hoops - Amulya instead has set his sights on the wild and unpredictable Mrinmoyee, a decision that brings the family much consternation when she decides to climb out of the window on their wedding night. In contrast to the dysfunctional relationships inherent in the previous stories, Samapti confronts the social paradigms that contribute to the inequality and polarization. Juxtaposed against a young couple's search for love and validation, the friction represents the difficult, but necessary process of cultural revolution in its painstaking negotiation of accepted roles and asserted individuality.

This oppositional image is subsequently reinforced in his disorienting return to his native village, whether trying to navigate the now unfamiliar geography of the town, peeking into the window of his home to see a young woman, Analía (Giselle Irrazabal) he has never met, or spending the night camped out at a neighbor's barn unable to go home, only to be dragged inside his parents' house to an anticlimactic reunion with his father (Nieves Cabrera) who is perplexed by his return and seems eager to see him leave. (Note an earlier juxtaposition of Farrel riding alongside harvested timber in the back of a logging truck - a shot that recalls the image of the impoverished woodcutter hitching a ride in La Libertad - that illustrates their mutual displacement and uprooting.) Curiously, Alonso introduces an ambiguity in his father's muted reaction to his homecoming that may not be the result of strained family relations, but rather, financial motivation, implied by Analía's nagging demands for money that reinforce his role as breadwinner for the family. It is this implicit connection between alienation and economics that incisively reframes the pathology of Liverpool in its distilled, allusive closing image, diverging from the notion of human idiosyncrasy towards a globalist indictment of its garish tokens of materialism and disposability.

Proceeding in flashback, the interconnected plight of Momo and Victor (who is first seen struggling with him, resisting attempts to be loaded into the van) seems destined - a fatedness that is revealed in an earlier episode in which Momo steals Victor's shoes after he falls asleep on a train platform, in essence, demonstrating their physical - and socioeconomic - interchangeability. The shot of an African immigrant girl passing Victor in a hallway illustrates another point of intersection among the disenfranchised, alluding to a sense of shared station (note a similar passing encounter in La Question humaine in the interstitial image of immigrants - including Adama Doumbia from La Blessure - being targeted by police for a random identification check). Similarly, Momo and Victor's encounter with an ailing homeless man, Blaise (Didier Berestetsky) on New Year's Eve seems fated, bound by the community of resigned marginalization. Within this context, Victor's search for Annabelle (Morgane Hainaux) in a crowded café and Momo's celebration of his nuptials also represent a paradoxical juncture, converging towards a fleeting glimpse of respite and normalcy, even as they reinforce their increasing distance from them.

Incorporating recurring, seasonal images of long, winding roads that weave the farms together into a collective portrait of isolation and obsolescence - a theme that is insightfully prefigured in the landing shot of Marcel grazing a flock of sheep with his Occitan-trained dog, Mirette - Depardon further juxtaposes images of death that implicitly correlate the fate of these ancestral farms: a visit to the reclusive Paul Argaud who is watching a televised broadcast of Abbé Pierre's funeral; the rapidly declining health of Raymond's prized cow; the news of Marcelle Brès's death, who had been the last inhabitant of the neighboring hamlet of Lhermet. However, the crisis of a disappearing way of life is not only relegated to an aging rural population, as a younger generation of farmers also echo similar tales of hardship and a limited future: Brès's former tenant farmers, Jean-François and Nathalie recount their struggle in the previous year with a virulent parasite that killed several cows, providing not so subtle encouragement to their son to study hard in order to have better opportunities and not follow in their footsteps; Germaine and Marcel Challaye, planning for their retirement, are resigned to selling the family farm after their children expressed a lack of interest in assuming control; Abel Jean and Gilberte Roy have entrusted the farm to their youngest son, Daniel who, in turn, resents being rooted to one place, and prefers the itinerant life of a seasonal worker; a young mother, Amandine Valla, eager to try her hand at farming, cannot afford the added maintenance of raising livestock and is forced to abandon her avocation. Closing with the shot of a sunlit narrow road that now leads away from familiar pastures, Depardon abstains from a direct commentary on cultural extinction and instead, captures the ephemeral moment under his own preservative glass, casting a lingering, reverent gaze over a gradually transforming landscape that is distant and sublime.

However, mediated images are not only relegated to the fiction of commercial advertisement, revealing itself in the realm of non-fiction in the way a filmmaker defines the scope of a documentary, where the subject is strategically (if arbitrarily) bounded into titrated, consummable sub-doses of a larger, unfilmable reality - a correlation that is reinforced through a similar suturing of a white screen with documentary footage of "real life". Within this paradigm, filmmaking - whether fiction or non-fiction - may also be seen as inherently a construction that, like the urban landscape, is created in the image of the society that consumes it, and therefore, is a tainted medium for creating social revolution. Rather than breaking away from the cinèma de papa that a liberation of cinema represents, the liberation of society requires the destruction of cinema itself as an enabling medium of social language, dismantling an apparatus of projected ideals in exchange for the tabula rasa of an amorphous and indefinable social ideal.

In an encounter with a Jewish family in Vilnius, a passing dinner conversation about traceable history as a kind of status symbol that is often denied ordinary people unexpectedly recalls an earlier conversation in Copans's maternal ancestral hometown of Picardy, where an enterprising man has decided to open his grandparents' home as a preservational museum, arguing that there is an audience interested in a glimpse of their forefathers' nineteenth century peasant life. In a wry coincidence, Copans's American cousin, a certified public accountant, keeps a framed picture of a fabricated family crest (claiming a Russian ancestry that the filmmaker was unable to decisively trace) and a collage of store fronts bearing the Copans name in order to impress clients with his many varied "business ventures" (in reality, the reference to Copans was from name of the street and not directly connected with the family). Perhaps the most illuminating point of convergence occurs in Copans's search through US census logs, assisted by a professional genealogist specializing in African American ancestry who explains that her focus stems from the absence of national archives available before the abolition of slavery in 1865, requiring additional research using ship manifests, plantation owner logs, and property tax assessments to trace distant ancestry. Reconnecting with long-time family friends who share their vivid memories of his grandparents as they immigrated to America to establish a new life, Copans's earlier reference to his father's jazz finds a paradoxical sense of arriving at a terminus in his grandparents' adopted home, where the exhilaration of new cultures transcends the particularity of the immigrant experience and converges towards a human one.

Vithanage incisively parallels religious themes of cycle, enlightenment, and renewal within the context of endemic poverty in order to expose the dysfunctional institutions that help perpetuate the inhumanity (and unnaturality) of the protracted civil war. In retrospect, Bandara's expressed hopes of providing a better life for his family by becoming a soldier reflects the villagers' sense of despair as well, where young men from the provinces (such as Sunanda's suitor, Somay), unable to eke out a decent living through farming, increasingly see the military as the only means to improve their circumstances which, in turn, indirectly serve to perpetuate a conflict that fosters destabilization (in one episode, the government authorizes the addition of a bus stop in the village in memory of Bandara, linking the seemingly noble pursuit of socioeconomic development with politically-motivated appeasement). This interrelation is further implied in the military's contingency death benefits that preclude independent investigation, where acceptance of payment represents a tacit compensation for silence and complicity. Framed against Wannihami's defiance, the breaking of the seal (and consequently, the metaphoric covenant with these exploitive institutions) is also a humble act of enlightenment - a search for truth in the face of isolation, adversity, and dispossession.

Vithanage poses this idea of personal history as collective consciousness in Suwisal and Piyumi's intersecting fates after a twenty year separation, integrally linking the leftist movements of the late 1960s embraced by student radicals with the ongoing civil war. The duality is illustrated in an episode in which Suwisal and a friend reminisce about their involvement in an organized protest in 1969 that initially seems to reinforce, then negate their commitment to social justice, rationalizing that the ideal outcome would be for Piyumi to be found guilty without ever recognizing her former employer, thus avoiding any potential scandal. Their conversation reframes an earlier flashback in which university student Suwisal returns to the country and decides to briefly join the farmers in their harvest in between studies (a naïve attempt at worker solidarity that is reinforced in a shot of him removing his sandals to walk barefoot behind cattle). But his egalitarian gesture proves to be hollow. In a subsequent encounter, Suwisal, having already taken advantage of the trusting Piyumi, offers her a handful of money in lieu of undying devotion, and later ignores her pleas for help after discovering that she is pregnant. This interconnection between past transgression and present unrest is similarly suggested in Suwisal's return trips to the family mansion after a long absence, initially in his visit home to work on a Marxist thesis away from the chaos of campus protests (and brief his disinterested aunt on how his activism intersects with a global social revolution), and subsequently, to recuperate from the emotional toll of the trial, and is once again confronted with his own impotence after a group of tenant farmers ask for his help in finding their missing sons who have been rounded and disappeared in the waging of the protracted conflict.

At each juncture, Suwisal's actions prove to be in opposition: retreating to privilege amid calls for solidarity, and conforming to majority opinion in order to bring swift, if unjust, closure to a tainted past. Visually, Vithanage illustrates the disjunction through narrative ellipses that not only interweave past and present, but also between indeterminate presents that reflect Suwisal - and by extension, the country's - unreconciled conscience. Similar to Ritwik Ghatak, Vithanage also integrates dissonant, yet naturalistic soundscapes to reinforce rupture and conflict, most notably in the prefiguring sound of a crying woman at the empty mansion that is repeated in a subsequent, similarly dissociated shot of Suwisal taking a shower, and in the amplified sound of dust sheets being removed from furniture that reflects the implicit violence of his deeply buried transgression and the turmoil caused by its revelation. Closing with the shot of Piyumi walking away into the horizon, her haunting image becomes - like Suwisal's (and a nation's) process of redemption - a reflection of a shared uncertainty and broken humanity.

Set during Uruguay's transition to democracy after years of military dictatorship, its repressive legacy is still evident in the arbitrary inspections by guards who patrol the porous border between Brazil and Uruguay - a constant, looming threat that is embodied by the intimidating, mobile customs agent Meleyo (Nelson Lence) who, near the beginning of the film, chases a group of returning cyclists from across the hills in his off-road truck before crushing the entire contents of a rider's parcel and confiscating a bottle of rum from Beto's friend, Valvulina (Mario Silva) in retaliation for attempting to running away. Already eking out a meager existence by running grocery orders from local shops to neighboring stores in Brazil, Beto's livelihood is further strained when he is blacklisted by shopkeepers after an afternoon of carousing (propelled, in part, by guards confiscating his groceries after discovering alkaline batteries that had been smuggled, without his knowledge, by a shopkeeper). But salvation seems at hand with the arrival of the pope along with the thousands of pilgrims expected to make the journey into town for the occasion, and villagers have already begun to stake their concessions spots along the route, where they hope to peddle their wares - assorted refreshments, balloons, and commemorative banners - before a generous (and hungry) crowd. Meanwhile, pope fever has also spread to Beto's household, with him eager to earn enough money for a motorcycle that can outrun the customs agents (and prevent further injury to his already hobbled knee), his wife, Carmen (Virginia Méndez) fretting over having enough money to send their teenaged daughter, Silvia (Virginia Ruiz) to a vocational school, and Sylvia, in turn, dreaming of a more glamorous career in journalism, perhaps inspired by the media frenzy surrounding the papal visit that have turned ordinary villagers into perennial television news fixtures.

Interweaving archival footage from street reports and excerpts from the papal visit within the fictional story of Beto's search for a better life, Charlone and Fernández create an ambiguity between truth and fiction that reflect the film's underlying social realism. By presenting the villagers' plight as a series of inequitable encounters - whether by corrupt border guards, shopkeepers (who deduct fees for confiscated items), the media (who sensationalize events in order to create news and boost viewership), and even the church (in an ironic episode, Valvulina's wife, Teresa [Rosario Dos Santos] buys a souvenir medallion from a member of the pope's entourage, even as her vended snacks remained unsold) - the filmmakers reinforce the idea that enabled institutions collectively lead to entrenched marginalization and poverty. It is this sense of collusive exploitation that is implied in Beto's impotent act of protest, implicating both the media and the church in their hollow calls for benediction, as well as the consumerist society (as symbolized by a television that was purchased on installment) that conceals its own degraded status under artificial tokens of privilege.

Behind the Rainbow (Jihan El-Tahri, 2009)
Wed Apr 8: *8pm; Mon Apr 13: *2:50pm

The Fighting Spirit (George Amponsah, 2007) screening with
Siki, Ring Wrestler (Mamadou Niang, 1993)
Fri Apr 10: 1pm; Sun Apr 12: *5:15pm

Filmmakers Against Racism:
Congo My Foot (Okepne Ojang, 2008)
Martine and Thandeka (Xoliswa Sithole, 2008)
The Burning Man - Ernesto Alfabeto Nhamuave (Adze Ugah, 2008)
Baraka (Omelga Mthiyane and Riaan Hendricks, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *10pm; Sun Apr 12: *12:30pm

From A Whisper (Wanuri Kahiu, 2008)
Sat Apr 11: *3:00pm; Tue Apr 14: 7:00pm

The Importance of Being Elegant (George Amponsah, 2004)
Thu Apr 9: 2:15; Sat Apr 11: 10pm

In My Genes (Lupita Nyong’o, 2009)
Sun Apr 12: *9:15; Tues Apr 14: 5pm

Jerusalema (Ralph Ziman, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *7:15pm; Tues Apr 14: *9:00pm

Killer Necklace (Judy Kibinge, 2009) screening with
Area Boys (Omelihu Nwanguma, 2008)
Thu Apr 9:* 9pm; Mon Apr 13: *10:00pm

Kinshasa Palace (Jose Laplaine, 2006)
Wed Apr 8: 1:45pm; Mon Apr 13: 5:30pm

Paris or Nothing (Josephine Ndagnou, 2008)
Wed Apr 8: 3:30pm; Mon Apr 13: 7:30pm

The Prodigal Son (Kurt Orderson, 2008) screening with
Bronx Princess (Yoni Brook and Musa Syeed, 2008) and
African Booty Scratcher (Nikyatu Jusu, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: 3pm; Sun Apr 12: *2:40pm

Sacred Places (Jean-Marie Téno, 2009)
Wed Apr 8: *6:00pm; Sat Apr 11: *1pm

Sex, Okra and Salted Butter (Mahamat Saleh Haroun, 2008)
Fri Apr 10: *5:10pm; Sun Apr 12: *7:20pm

Triomf (Michael Raeburn, 2008)
Thu Apr 9: *6:15pm; Mon Apr 13: 12:30pm

Wrestling Grounds (Cheick Ndiaye, 2006)
Thu Apr 9: 4pm; Sat Apr 11: *7:35pm

Yandé Codou, The Griot of Senghor (Angèle Diabang Brener, 2008) screening with
Nora (Alla Kovgan and David Hinton, 2008) and
Coming of Age (Judy Kibinge, 2008)
Sat Apr 11: *5:15pm; Tue Apr 14: 2:40pm

*African directors and guest speakers will be present during the festival.

Having won the cash prize of 290 euros for the past two contests (which promptly went to pay for tuition at a correspondence school and subsequently, dental treatment), Norma reveals that she is planning to buy her young daughter a Christmas present if she wins this year's contest, having continued to maintain the ruse (albeit tenuously) for the past three years that she has gone far away to work. The ruse of a pesky, overseas job also proves convenient for Argentinean national, Adalberto "Beto" Usoli, explaining to his beloved elderly grandmother that his extended absence and infrequent (and spotty reception) calls home are the result of working aboard a cruise ship. Accused of embezzling 3,000 euros from his employer, Beto moved to Spain in order to be closer to his Barcelonian lover, and is petitioning to resolve his case in the Spanish court system, fearing a lengthy separation from his partner if he is extradited back to Argentina. Following one's heart proves to be Lithuanian immigrant and counterfeiter, Rudolf Schlessinger's Achilles heel as well, having violated the terms of his weekend furlough in order to spend more time with an attractive young woman he had just met, and has been handed down an additional sentence for the impulsive act, delaying his upcoming parole. Beto's limbo within the Spanish court system is also echoed in the indefinite imprisonment of a young woman, Patricia Ávarez, the eldest of twelve children who is serving an open ended sentence for drug possession, and in the plight of Arturo Jiménez, a Madrileño of gypsy descent and devoted family man who has been detained for over two years at the Valdemoro Men's Prison awaiting a court date on drug trafficking charges.

The wide reach of the drug trade also casts its shadow on recovering addict and self-admitted black sheep of the family, Estefanía Maestre (who, like the young, unemployed couple in José Luis Guerín's En Construcción, hails from the working class port town of El Chino) who has found a measure of stability in her life with her fiancé Cristian (and who, in turn, is serving ten years for wounding his former girlfriend's lover in a jealous rage) and is eager to move on, but must wait until they both serve out their sentences. Another is José Antonio Gardoqui, the gravel-voiced, former drummer of a popular 80s band called "Burning" who once robbed banks to feed his habit, and his girlfriend and fellow inmate, Fortu, who tried to save her addicted children from the streets (ultimately, in vain) by buying drugs for them. In each story, Bosch illustrates an underlying pattern of marginalization and underprivilege - poverty, under-education, racism, alienation, and despair - that binds each contestant's search for happiness and normalcy. As in Ramos's films, the absence of an overarching commentary creates a sense of intimacy between subject and viewer. However, while Ramos reinforces the image of entrenched hierarchical structures in interactions with authorities, Bosch collapses these structures by filming solely from the perspective of the inmates, enabling their figurative self-expression through heartfelt song renditions and articulated personal aspirations that capture the humanity beneath their marginalized lives, and the quotidian moments of grace that reaffirm their dignity.

The line-up for this year's Rendez-vous with French Cinema has been announced, and with the back to back programming with Film Comment Selects, it looks as though I'll have to make some tough planning choices on which films to catch on an extended weekend. Suffice it to say...help!

OPENING NIGHT

Paris 36 / Faubourg 36 (Christophe Barratier, 2008)
Alice Tully Hall: Thu Mar 5: 8:00pm

U.S. PREMIERE

35 Shots of Rum / 35 Rhums Claire Denis, 2008)
Film Society of Lincoln Center: Fri Mar 13: 1:30pm
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 6:15pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 8:00pm
IFC Center: Thu Mar 12: 7:00pm

Mesrine Part 1 / Mesrine, L’instinct de mort (Jean-François Richet, 2008)
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 6:15pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 1:30pm

Mesrine Part 2 / Mesrine, L’ennemi public n° 1 (Jean-François Richet, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 6:00pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 3:50pm

NORTH AMERICAN PREMIERE

The Apprentice / L’apprenti (Samuel Collardey, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 3:45pm
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 8:45pm
IFC: Mon Mar 9: 7:00pm

Bellamy (Claude Chabrol, 2009)
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 3:45pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 9:10pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 1:00pm
IFC: Fri Mar 6: 9:30pm

Change of Plans / Le code a changé (Danièle Thompson, 2009)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 6:20pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 8:45pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 3:30pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 7:00pm

Eden Is West / Eden à l’ouest (Costa-Gavras, 2009)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 9:00pm
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 1:30pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 4:00pm

The Joy of Singing / Le Plaisir de chanter (Ilan Duran Cohen, 2008)
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 3:30pm
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 1:00pm
IFC: Wed Mar 11: 7:00pm

The Other One / L’Autre (Patrick Mario Bernard and Pierre Trividic, 2008)
FSLC: Wed Mar 11: 9:00pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 5:30pm
IFC: Tue Mar 10: 7:00pm

Stella (Sylvie Verheyde, 2008)
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 1:00pm
FSLC: Thu Mar 12: 6:15pm
IFC: Wed Mar 11: 9:30pm

Villa Amalia (Benoît Jacquot, 2009)
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 8:45pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 14: 6:45pm
IFC: Thu Mar 12: 9:30pm

NEW YORK PREMIERE
The Beaches of Agnès / Les Plages d’Agnès (Agnès Varda, 2008)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 1:30pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 8:45pm

The Girl from Monaco / La Fille de Monaco (Anne Fontaine, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 1:00pm
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 6:35pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 1:30pm

Séraphine (Martin Provost, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 8:45pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 12:30pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 4:00pm

Versailles (Pierre Schoeller, 2008)
FSLC: Fri Mar 6: 3:30pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 8: 6:00pm
IFC: Sat Mar 7: 1:30pm

With a Little Help from Myself / Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera (François Dupeyron, 2008)
FSLC: Sat Mar 7: 4:10pm
FSLC: Mon Mar 9: 1:00pm
FLSC: Mon Mar 9: 6:15pm
IFC: Fri Mar 6: 7:00pm

WORLD PREMIERE
The Girl on the Train / La Fille du RER (André Téchiné, 2009)
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 3:30pm
FSLC: Tue Mar 10: 9:10pm
IFC: Sun Mar 8: 6:45pm

TOUT COURT: NEW FRENCH SHORTS
France, 2008; 90m
Baby (Bébé, Clément Michel); New Skin (Peau neuve, Clara Elalouf); Good Night Malik (Bonne nuit Malik, Bruno Danan); The Fire, The Blood, The Stars (Le feu, le sang, les étoiles, Caroline Deruas); My Little Brother from the Moon (Mon petit frère est de la lune, Frédéric Philibert); and My Name Is Dominic (Tous les enfants s’appellent Dominique, Nicolas Silhol).
FSLC: Fri Mar 13: 4:00pm
FSLC: Sun Mar 15: 3:15pm