During the Q&A, Jacquot commented that the real-life inspiration for the film was a fait divers that had set a precedence for mental manipulation as a legal basis for criminal responsibility under French law. Ostensibly the story of Joséphine (Isild Le Besco), a pious young woman who abandons her privileged life to follow a coarse, mesmeric drifter, Timothée (Nahuel Perez Biscayart) across the provincial countryside, the film explores the grey area between identity and role, will and compulsion. Especially intriguing is the way Jacquot ambiguously frames seduction as a kind of mental sleight of hand - a performance (and an apparently nefarious one) intended to override free will. By capturing the shifting dynamics between the captor and captive, Jacquot poses a fascinating paradigm in defining the ephemeral nature of desire.

The question of identity and performance also forms the core of René Féret's period piece, Mozart's Sister. Based on the life of Mozart's older sister, Nannerl (Marie Féret), whose own ambitions and future had been subjugated to promote the international reputation and career of the young prodigy, the film finds kinship with Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse in capturing the stricture, captivity, and marginalization of women in eighteenth century society.

Based on Keith Ridgway's first novel (albeit translated from rural Ireland to Belgium), Martin Provost's The Long Falling is a thoughtful and provocative interrogation on guilt, culpability, and redemption. Tracing the trajectory of a middle-aged woman's (Yolande Moreau) attempt to break away from her abusive husband and reconnect with her estranged son (Eric Godon), the film elegantly captures the deeply rooted dysfunctional cruelty, repression, and psychological enabling that forges the heroine's transformation. Weighing the mother and son's violent reactions against past transgressions, The Long Falling exposes the inhumanity of inaction and instinctual self-preservation that underlies the moral ambiguity of a seemingly justifiable murder.

The idea of defining one's identity while living under another person's shadow resurfaces in Eric Lartigau's The Big Picture. Based on the novel by Douglas Kennedy, the film chronicles the unraveling of a successful attorney (Romain Duris) after the collapse of his marriage. Striking the tone and tension of a Patricia Highsmith novel (as well as the moral ambiguity of the antihero), the film's attraction resides in Duris's subtly modulated performance in his ever-transforming persona as law partner, family man, fugitive, recluse, and photojournalist. Suggesting kinship with Jacquot's Villa Amalia in the narrative arc of an adrift protagonist traveling to a remote region in order to escape a life-altering trauma (this time, within the framework of a genre film), The Big Picture proves to be a competent, if unremarkable exploration of identity, fugue, and reinvention.

Ironically, the idea of constant reinvention also captures of Claude Lelouch's autoportrait, From One Film to Another. Admittedly, I had never been a great admirer of Lelouch's pastiche, uneven cinema. That said, Lelough's obviously deep love for the cinema and desire to continue to make each successive film unlike anything he had done before in the quixotic quest to make the perfect film made for an interesting biography. Opening with a jaw dropping archival footage of the young filmmaker racing through the streets of Paris by weaving his way through traffic, skidding through sharp turns, and barreling past red lights, Lelouch creates a metaphor for the kind of risk-taking, recklessness, and exhilaration that embody the spirit of his films. Having been figuratively born into the cinema with his parents meeting over Mark Sandrich's Top Hat - and subsequently hiding him from the Germans during occupied France by bringing him from one movie house to the next during the school day - Lelouch's unorthodox education has not only led him to embrace all forms of cinema, but also to try his hand at the different genres. Running the gamut from drama, to western, to romantic comedy, to musical, Lelouch's humorous and self-effacing survey of his film career reinforce the idiosyncrasy, audacity, and infectious enthusiasm that binds together his singular body of work.

Harun Farocki's Respite is something of a ghost film, revisiting his exposition on the intersection between productivity and violence (as captured by the unseen reconnaissance photographs of Auschwitz) in Images of the World and the Inscription of War, and dissecting the nature of image production and its role in inscribing - and intrinsically, codifying - history. It is an attempt to connect the visible and the invisible that is also suggested in Sylvie Lindeperg's essay, Suspended Lives, Revenant Images. On Harun Farocki's Film Respite. To this end, Lindeperg describes Farocki's use of found footage and archival photographs as an "exhumation", suggesting the dual nature of these companion films (Respite consists of footage from the Westerbork transit camp) as a critique of history and filmmaking, both converging on the implication of images. Moreover, since the Westerbork footage exists as a set of unedited rushes rather than a completed work, Lindeperg reinforces this analogy by referring to Farocki's deconstruction in Respite as the figurative reassembly of a "phantom film".

Images of the World and the Inscription of War underlines the troubling proximity between acts of conservation and acts of destruction, the relationship between the violence of war and the technologies of recording and reconnaissance, the instability of meaning at work in the image ...[The film] therefore forcefully underlines the necessary "collusion of image and text in the writing of history." The knowledge constituted by eyewitness accounts permits us to decode elements hidden in the image, to recognize what was inscribed there, but neither interpreted nor even seen at the time it was recorded. The conjunction of seeing and knowing thus allows us to recover the unthought of the photograph at the moment of its making. This reading appears as the product of an encounter between historical knowledge, the regime of memory, the symbolic and social demands that condition the exhumation of photographs, the questions addressed to them, the ways of decoding them.

In introducing this parallel image of a ghost film that can be reconfigured to reveal malleable layers of reality and meaning, Lindeperg broaches on the idea of filmmaking as archaeology and an act of conjuring. However, rather than a treatise on the ambiguity of truth and fiction in the vein of José Luis Guerín's Tren de sombras, Lindeperg illustrates the intrinsic paradox of the wartime footage intended to capture (and preserve for history) the way of life of a people who were targeted for extermination:

Fritz Hippler recalls the instructions given to him by Goebbels while filming in Lodz in 1940: 'Film everything you see: the life and the crowds in the streets; the commerce and trade, the rituals in the synagogue, crime, none of this should be forgotten. It has to be captured in its original state.'

...These remarks attributed to Goebbels reveal, above all, the conjunction between the act of archiving and disappearance that prefigures the tragic encounter between putting-in-an-image and putting-to-death. From 1942, in fact, filming was continued and increased in the Polish ghettos. The Nazis filmed those that they were going to kill, documenting them because they were going to kill them.

It is this dichotomy that underscores the idea of cinema and image-making as the process of preservation and destruction, where memory is formed by the sequencing of images, each one supplanted by the next.

In Images of the World and the Inscription of War, Farocki juxtaposes photographs from diverse sources in order to decode the traces of the event inscribed in the pictures while simultaneously taking the measure of what is not immediately represented. In Respite, however, he starts with a single source in order to evoke memory-images. The sequences of Westerbork thus become palimpsest images, which summon to the surface other image-strata, which recall the memory and history of cinema. Accordingly, the black intertitle cards play the role of crystallizers of memory and facilitators of vision, while simultaneously providing a space for absent images.

In this respect, Respite not only proposes to refigure history, but also to resurrect the dead through reconstituted images, to form a more durable image-memory in their absence.

There is another meaning of the title Respite that refers to the notion of latency, to the passing and the work of time, the time that mirrors the forgotten scenes of life in the camp and that extends to the present. In this sense, the force of Farocki's film depends on the contextualization of these shots within the mechanisms of propaganda as well as the confidence he places in their autonomous power. Detached from the intentions of the film, the luminous faces of the persecuted appear before us as revenant images. This spectral effect allows an emotion to surge forth that assures the posthumous victory of these captive men, women and children placed in front of the camera at the whim of their jailor, since time can foil the designs of the conquerors, and the image, as Chris Marker observed, has the power to transform the dead into something eternal.

In contrast to the aerial shots of the tourist sites, the camera takes a position low to the ground to photograph the favela from the base of the hill to the top. This angle enables dos Santos to give audiences a better sense of the size and steepness of the hill as well as the closeness and poverty of the wooden shacks, which lack even running water. We see a boy walking up the hill with a can of water on his head and several others making their way down narrow paths and onto the paved streets filled with marketplaces, cafés, and palm trees. These few shots make clear that the favela is quite close to the city; but life in the metropole is so much richer that it seems like another planet.

In the essay, Rio, Zona Norte, Mandacaru Vermelho, Boca de Ouro, and the beginning of the Cinema Novo Movement, Sadlier examines dos Santos's early, transitional films that, while entirely different in their scope (and levels of critical and commercial success), reveal recurring themes and methodologies that would resurface throughout his body of work: race and indigenous identity versus assimilated Western culture (Rio, Zona Norte), landlessness and migrant workers (Mandacaru Vermelho), and a translational approach to literary adaptation (Boca de Ouro). Also, by locating these films within the chronology of Cinema Novo, Sadlier makes a salient point on dos Santos's precedence with respect to the birth of the movement, correcting the common misconception that aligns his cinema squarely with the emergence of Glauber Rocha, Leon Hirszman, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Carlos Diegues, and Arnold Jabor under the rubric of Cinema Novo.

Sadlier expounds on Dos Santos's translational approach to adapting literature in her detailed analysis of Vidas secas. Based on the novel by Brazilian author Graciliano Ramos (whose autobiographical novel, Memories of Prison, would later be adapted by dos Santos in 1984), dos Santos not only took advantage of the novel's cyclical structure to rearrange the self-contained stories for dramatic effect, but also dispensed with much of the characters' philosophical inner monologues in order to retain a more visceral connection with the nature of poverty.

Between and within sections, characters' thoughts and moods often undergo swift, radical changes, revealing their curiosity about language and undermining certain stereotypical notions about "primitives" derived from nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature. In fact, Ramos's novel is as much or more concerned with the "human and contradictory" language and consciousness of the retirante (peasant migrant) as it is with the brutal landowning system of the Northeast.

...Dos Santos's film dramatizes this scene in its entirety [an episode in which the oldest son struggles with his mother's explanation of the concept of inferno], but it somewhat downplays the boy's curiosity about the words and his desire to understand what he does not know, giving greater emphasis to the ironic relationship between the word 'hell' and the boy's immediate surroundings.

In Culture and Cannibalism: Como era gostoso o meu francês, Sadlier frames How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman within the context of cultural extermination as a result of the military government's attempts to bring "civilization" to the indigenous people as part of its national development campaign. By drawing on colonial history, the cannibalism serves as an allegory for the consumption of one culture by another - a phenomenon that speaks directly to Brazilian society's continued emulation of European culture long after the country's independence. (Note: The equation of cannibalism with cultural consumption also appears in Joaquim Pedro de Andrade's Macunaíma).

Sadlier further proposes an intriguing corollary that by filming from the perspective of the indigenous tribe, dos Santos is recreating a historical record that had been erased from "official" history through a process of what critic Raymond Williams describes as "selective tradition" in which culture is redefined by the prevailing attitudes of contemporary society (and that, by nature, reinforces these biases and aspirations).

Viewed in these terms, dos Santos's film is less interested in distorting a canonical text than in revealing what that text omits. Its documentary-like or "anthropological" style directly participates in an effort of reinterpretation by providing the viewer with a simulation of what has been lost, not just in time but also through the selective cultural process. Dos Santos's solidarity with the Tupinambá can therefore be described as an ideological position in powerful contrast with the interests and values of the dominant class in Brazil, which has always identified with Europeans, especially the French.

The collapse of populism in the 1960s also coincided with dos Santos's divergence from a purely leftist agenda towards a more humanist cinema, a transition that is reflected in the fabular dimension to Ogum's Amulet:

Although dos Santos had long been aware of religious practices in the favela, his approach in his earliest films was strictly Marxist, focusing on social class and race while implicitly dismissing religion as an opiate of the masses. O amuleto de Ogum makes clear not only the centrality of religion in the lives of the poor but also the ways in which umbanda reinforces class solidarity and gives a kind of power to individuals who are caught in a violent and corrupt world.

Stadlier also illustrates this ideological shift in her analysis of Memories of Prison and Cinema of Tears. In Memories of Prison, dos Santos creates early ambiguity on the identity of the author and main character, Graciliano Ramos, by placing him in the milieu of the general prison population, in essence, democratizing the attribution of "hero" to all the prisoners. In Cinema of Tears, dos Santos's Latin American contribution to the BFI's Century of Cinema project (on filmmaker searching for a lost film that connects him to a tragic episode from his past), he embraces the escapism of popular studio-produced films and their ability to connect with the audience.

The actor's search through the archive is also, of course, a fictional device that allows dos Santos to show brief clips, most of them in pristine condition, of wonderfully evocative black-and-white films of the studio era. By this means he pays tribute to a generation of directors, cinematographers, and stars who became internationally famous largely because of their work in melodramas. Although the content of these films had little to do with the social reality of the moviegoing public, the Mexican melodramas were among the highest-quality films made in Latin America. In effect, dos Santos who began his career as a neorealist and a symbol of the Latin American New Wave, takes a revisionary approach to a genre that, like the chanchada [musical comedies], was often criticized by the Left because of its association with Hollywood.

While Falling from Earth (Chadi Zeneddine) suggests affinity with the films of Theo Angelopoulos in its intersection of personal and national history, the film finds greater kinship with Hector Faver's Memory of Water in its interweaving elements of documentary, fiction, and imagination. As in Faver's film, Falling from Earth is equally poetic and frustratingly heavy-handed in its elliptical and allusive tale of an aging, disconnected exile who parses through the rubble of his tormented past in an attempt to come to terms with his mortality and legacy.

Of the three short video works in the Akram Zaatari program, All Is Well at the Border proves to be the strongest entry, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Ici et ailleurs in its tale of two cities and the alienating, fragile peace of a status quo struggle for power and control. By presenting modern-day Lebanon as a collage of scarred streets, demolition, and reconstruction accompanied by the testimonies of former political prisoners during the occupation, Zaatari creates a potent allegory for the Palestinian conflict and a haunting survey of war's subtle, yet indelible imprint on physical and human landscapes.

The second offering in the Zaatari program, Red Chewing Gum is more experimental and abstract in its execution than the quasi-documentary, All Is Well at the Border, a spoken word rendering of two estranged childhood friends and the memory of an encounter with a chewing gum peddler. Punctuated by the repeated refrain, "no sugar left" as the peddler discards his used gum into a cardboard box, the film serves as a metaphor for the fracture and irreparable damage of the Lebanese civil war.

The least effective entry in the Zaatari program is Crazy for You, a survey of the mating ritual told from the perspective of working class men in modern day Lebanon. Colorful and forthright in its stories of romantic conquests, Zaatari treads a culturally taboo-breaking, if banal road in examining the country's decidedly mixed message towards modernity and socially progressive attitudes - a dichotomy that Zaatari wryly reinforces in a bawdy drinking song of machismo strength - one that can withstand the weight of a collapsing wall - shot against the rubble of a dilapidated house.

Part autobiography and part refiguration of turbulent history, Randa Chahal Sabag's Our Imprudent Wars, like Albert Solé's Bucharest, Memory Lost, is a clear-eyed and probing assessment of the personal toll of a family's lifelong activism and resistance. Born to intellectual, globe-trotting parents, Sabag would bear witness to the tumult resulting from her family's commitment to social engagement - first, in her parents' militant, left-leaning politics, then subsequently, in her older siblings' involvement with the militia during the Lebanese civil war. Struggling to reconstruct her family's ambiguous and ever-shifting circumstances during the war, Sabag presents an incisive analogy to the murky politics, inflexible ideology, and dubious alliances that led the protracted civil war itself.

The militancy of ordinary people during the civil war and occupation of southern Lebanon also provides the framework for Sabag's Souha Randa, a fascinating portrait of (then) recently liberated radicalized student turned communist revolutionary, Souha Bechara who, at the age of 21, was arrested after her failed assassination of provisional officer, General Antoine Lahad. Following Bechara as she readjusts to her former life - albeit this time, as a national hero - in a newly liberated southern Lebanon, the film interweaves historical footage with Souha's emotional visit to Khiam prison where she once languished and was repeatedly tortured. With the prison now transformed into a teaching museum commemorating the struggle, the contrasting images of Khiam (made all the more visceral by Bechara's account of her ordeal) creates an insightful juxtaposition - facilitating a constructive dialogue to a new generation in its acknowledgement of turbulent history and celebration of renewal.

Thank you for reading this site (and its earlier incarnation) for the past 14 years. I'm looking forward to attending this year's NYFF as a spectator.

July 11

Program 1: Pictures of Quiet Light
Song and Solitude (Nathaniel Dorsky)
The Great Art of Knowing (David Gatten)
Pitcher of Colored Light (Robert Beavers)

Program 2: Breaking the Waves
Observando el Cielo (Jeanne Liotta)
At Sea (Peter Hutton)
The God of Day Had Gone Down Upon Him (Stan Brakhage)

July 18

Program 3: I'll Keep It With Mine
She Puppet (Peggy Ahwesh)
Nest of Tens (Miranda July)
Poetry and Truth (Peter Kubelka)
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine (Peter Tscherkassky)
The General Returns from One Place to Another (Michael Robinson)
Rehearsals for Retirement (Phil Solomon)

Program 4: Some Velvet Morning
Trees of Syntax, Leaves of Axis (Daishi Saito)
Easter Morning (Bruce Conner)
False Aging (Lewis Klahr)
Black and White Trypps Number Three (Ben Russell)
Light Work (Jennifer Reeves)
Lumphini 2552 (Tomonari Nishikawa)
Horizontal Boundaries (Pat O'Neill)

July 25

Program 5: Liberty or Death
Ah Liberty! (Ben Rivers)
Star Spangled to Death (Ken Jacobs)
Footnotes to a House of Love (Laida Lertxundi)
The Fourth Watch (Janie Geiser)
An Injury to One (Travis Wilkerson)

Program 6: Confidential
A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (Apichatpong Werasethakul)
Tabula Rasa (Vincent Grenier)
Dwarfs the Sea (Stephanie Barber)
Let Me Count the Ways 10...9...8...7...6... (Leslie Thornton)
Great Man and Cinema (Jim Finn)
Second and Lee (Kevin Everson)
Something Else (Kevin Everson)
Memory of It - Three Related Documents (The Speculative Archive)

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Best of the Decade Avant-Garde Poll Submittal

Eniaios IV "Nefeli Photos" reel 2 Gregory Markopoulous – Robert Beavers, Greece, 2004
Respite – Harun Farocki, Germany/South Korea, 2007
13 Lakes – James Benning, U.S., 2005
A Trip to the Louvre (Une Visite au Louvre x 2) - Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet, France, 2004
When It Was Blue– Jennifer Reeves, U.S., 2008
At Sea – Peter Hutton, U.S., 2007
War at a Distance – Harun Farocki, Germany, 2003
Song and Solitude – Nathaniel Dorsky, U.S., 2006
Kolkata – Mark LaPore, U.S./India 2005
Michelangelo Eye to Eye – Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy, 2004
Instructions for a Light and Sound Machine – Peter Tscherkassky, Austria, 2005
Poetry and Truth – Peter Kubelka, Austria, 2003
Star Spangled To Death – Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2003
Sense of Architecture – Heinz Emigholz, Austria, 2005-2009
Hide – Matthius Müller and Christoph Girardet, U.S., 2007
Letter to Uncle Boonmee – Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Thailand/UK/Germany, 2009
RR – James Benning, U.S., 2008
Schindler’s Houses (Photography and Beyond Part 12) – Heinz Emigholz, Austria, 2007
Let Me Count the Ways Minus 10, 9, 8, 7… – Leslie Thornton, U.S., 2004
Capitalism: Slavery – Ken Jacobs, U.S., 2006

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.