I think festivals should always pray for chilly, rainy weather because there is a direct correlation between screening attendance and sunshine, i.e. the better the weather the fewer movie goers, which might explain this years long lines and inability to get in to watch some films last week in Austin. With all the rain, I felt like I had never left the East Coast.
Much has been said about the films in Austin and how it is a growing festival with a unique angle on the intersection between film distribution and technology. Panel after panel discussed why some digital ventures don’t deliver, the future of independent film distribution, and how to succeed in making a video go viral (without kittens). We are entering what is probably phase 2 of DIY film distribution, where ventures such as BSide proved that there were audiences to be reached using online outreach to get niche audiences to screenings, but failed to generate sufficient revenue for their investors. We have the Auteurs who offer a proprietary VOD platform but can’t get eyeballs, suggesting that technology and content alone are not sufficient. And now YouTube has announced that it will offer Pay Per View to independent filmmakers. Is it the solution filmmakers have been waiting for or is the habit of free to deeply entrenched in the YouTube culture to translate to Pay Per View? I guess we’ll see… one of our upcoming Knitting Factory Entertainment releases is a YouTube Pay Per View feature and so far it is going well at more than 166,000 views.
On the film side, I had my favorites. I think the highlight was the after-party for CANAL STREET MADAM. Talking to the (in)famous Jeanette was a pleasure and only proved my hunch that the lady might be a whore, but she isn’t anybody’s victim. Another viewer over at Indiewire suggested that she is simply ‘libidouness,’ but that is like saying that most people go to work in the morning not for the money but for the pleasure. Perhaps that is true for the guys over at IndieWire, but tell that to your average joe and he’ll probably spit in your coffee. Most of us, alas, must work for our bread and Jeanette earned hers the old fashioned way. Nothing wrong with that – like she said, if it is between two consenting adults it shouldn’t be illegal.
The EyeSteel Films crew was out in full force. Omar Majeed, the filmmaker behind TAQWACORE: THE BIRTH OF MUSLIM PUNK will be keeping fans new and old abreast of all things Taqwacore related at taqwacore.myfilmblog.com. Sign-up and stay tuned for updates regarding festival screenings, the upcoming NYC premier and theatrical dates throughout the summer.
REEL INJUN, which will open theatrically at MoMA in June, and THE SOUND OF INSECTS also garnered attention. Stay posted for further updates.
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Critically acclaimed documentary about the dramatic performance of one of the reigning queens of contemporary theater and film, Meryl Streep, as she interprets the role of Mother Courage in Tony Kushner's The Public Theater/NY Shakespeare Festival in Central Park production of Mother Courage and Her Children.
This inspired doc investigates the power of theater to provoke its viewers out of their complacency in the midst of protracted war, and proves the urgent relevancy of the great 1939 anti-war play by one of the twentieth century's most renowned playwrights, Bertolt Brecht.
"...filmmaker John Walter jumps from art to history and politics and back again, from the theater of the streets to the theater of the stage, without pause. That makes the movie... tough to summarize, which is part of its appeal" - Manohla Dargis, The New York Times
Definitive film on the gypsy punk rock band and international sensation uncovers the insane party culture of the band and its leader and borderline movie star Eugene Hutz.
“In “Gogol Bordello Non-Stop” [Eugene Hutz] emerges as a passionate, articulate philosopher of punk’s democratic participatory aesthetic who espouses the rejection of social hierarchies in concerts that are raucous, bacchanalian performance-art carnivals.” — Stephen Holden, The New York Times
A vibrant chronicle of one of today’s most notorious and revered live bands, GOGOL BORDELLO NON-STOP follows Eugene Hütz’s gypsy-punk brigade around the world as they spread their liberating libertine musical gospel. Filmmaker Margarita Jimeno tracks their raucous gigs from 2001 to 2006, from NYC to Italy, as the band rises from dingy basements to festival main-stages. The cast is a rotating circus of polyglot personalities from Israel, Russia and America, who dish on their music, their heritage, and their favored vices. Hütz, a sardonic mustachioed Ukrainian immigrant and the group ringleader, fuses his gypsy heritage with a love of punk rock and burlesque. Part carnival barker, social organizer, and poet, he’s a mesmerizing presence on-stage and off.
GOGOL BORDELLO NON-STOP is an artful documentary that mixes flamboyant costumes, intricate dance choreography, a relentless beat and an explosive energy not seen since the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll.
Nice to see that Last Train Home from EyeSteelFilm, the same production company that produced Up The Yangtze and the documentary Taqwacore, is getting a phenomenal reception. Ella Taylor from NPR writes:
And the Chinese documentary Last Train Home ended up as my favorite film of the festival, bar none. Director Lixin Fan followed a migrant-worker couple trying to get tickets for trips home to their village to see the kids they left with their grandmother years ago in order to earn a meager living. Watching this devastating portrait of a family trying to glue itself back together, you wonder how China, on its way to becoming the world's richest nation, will avoid civil war if it doesn't also attend to the needs of the millions of poverty-stricken families like this one.
It won the IDFA Best Documenatary Award and is apparently poised to storm America.
In 2006, The Public Theater in New York City mounted an outdoor production of Mother Courage and Her Children, which boasted a new translation by Tony Kushner, featured Streep and the great Kevin Kline, and was directed by the Public’s George C. Wolfe. Written in 1939 largely in response to the invasion of Poland by Hitler’s German army, the play is about the devastating effects of war and the blindness of anyone hoping to profit by it. Nearly seven decades later—as the war in Iraq wages on with no discernible end—Brecht’s play has a lamentable resonance. That is, it rhymes.
Walter takes us behind the scenes, including unprecedented access into Streep’s artistic process. He interweaves these scenes with enthralling details about the play’s author, including a pivotal moment of Brecht’s brilliant testimony before the House Un- American Activities Committee, when he gave a brilliant performance and quickly departed the stage and the country.
THEATER OF WAR is more than a backstage pass. It’s an engrossing and fiercely intelligent look at war and capitalism, and their regrettable dependence on one another. But even more, it’s about the power—if not responsibility—of art and artists to cast a light on that which we prefer not to see.
Starring: Meryl Streep and Bertolt Brecht
Directed By: John Walter