On That Evening Sun

By Evan Louison

For those familiar with Hal Holbrook’s much revered “Mark Twain Tonight!,” where the veteran American actor seemingly exhorts and sneers in the same breath as Samuel Clemens with equal amounts respect and humour, it should come as no surprise to find some of that same poise and cunning in his most recent performance, as the southern stalwart Abner Meecham in Scott Teems' brilliant new film, That Evening Sun. An award winner in Sarasota, it is the type of small, quiet project that goes easily unnoticed. Lo and behold, it has opened in New York on another busy weekend for "specialty" films in new York. I can’t really recommend it highly enough.

Adapted from the William Gay short story which in turn had its title lifted from a William Faulkner line “I hate to see that evening sun goes down…,” the film is at all points engrossing and halting. In a way, it disarms the viewer with the patience and temperate pace of its narrative, while at the same time, providing exhilarating work from its performers in plentiful doses. It reveals characters whose lives and fortunes are, quite literally, on the line in a taut and stirring manner.

The long and short of the film’s conceit is that Abner Meecham, relegated to a rest home after he suffers a fall on the farm he’s run with his wife of many years, recently deceased, is fed up. It is this experience, one of the world around him changing at a pace beyond his reasons and needs, his understandings, that compels him to flee the safety of his nursing home exile and return home, by hook or by crook. Defying all demands to return placed upon him by his son, whose decisions we find, are the ones that matter most in deciding Abner’s fate, he wants back what he can never have. Abner’s return to his lifelong home is one of misery and disappointment; he finds it undeniably changed, leased to a local ne’erdowell at his son’s bidding, someone Abner refers to not just in passing, as trash.

This controversy drives the various interested parties (Holbrook’s reactionary, stubborn old man, his son, a successful, legally justified malcontent, and the new tenants, a family of drunken father, doting mother, and rebellious, equally sexed and innocent daughter) into a web of dependence, annoyance, and antagonism. The war at hand at times seems overwrought with obstacles, rife with an insurmountable discontent, a land feud blown curiously out of proportion by Meecham’s refusal to change or compromise, and his decision to launch an all-out campaign against the new residents on his land. It is a wall of humid, impossible conflict, which can only end in frustrating, inevitable tragedy.

In a world of images, media, and expressions less than stunning, we can at times be handed with great ease many spoonfuls of shit in place of nurturing, challenging work. That which asks questions of us the viewer, which drives us to question our surroundings in tow, is what matters. This film is not of that lot. Instead it provides a rare offering of stark, fluid storytelling, and visceral, at times confounding performances. One for the ages. If this one doesn’t grant Holbrook the honor he deserves, the establishment has another thing coming. Go hence and discover for yourself.

On Stanley Bard @ Royal Flush Fest

By Evan Louison

As a cultural landmark, the Hotel Chelsea remains as much an enigma as ever before, despite repeated attempts in the mainstream to vilify or demonize it. Its many hedonistic and occasionally famous former residents, most of them long forgotten by those who have continued to inhabit it either for residency or work, seem to still haunt it. In turn, more recent attempts at lionization and pedestal placement have done little to illuminate most of the mystery behind what makes the place so site specific and original. Of these, Abel Ferrara’s Chelsea on the Rocks has been the most intentionally aimed at discovery and treasure hunting, although in an obscure and at times elusive sense, while Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls stood as a newer, if faulty attempt at the type of historical fiction that Warhol & Morrissey once painted in minimal beauty. While Ferrara’s film portrayed the struggle between longtime residents of the Hotel with new management hell-bent on stripping the Hotel of any ties to the eccentric nature of its history, Stanley Bard, a new portrait both in the nominal sense and the literal, focuses solely on the Hotel’s longtime manager, his life, and memories.

As a film, Sam Bassett’s Stanley Bard merits equal parts praise and criticism. Questioning of an artist’s work and motives is unavoidable, and especially with Bassett, being someone who clearly identifies without hesitancy with such a title (and the inevitable responsibility that comes hand in hand with it). The rough sound and image quality, at times non-existent structure, editing that leaves a scattershot, possibly crazed and certainly frenetic feel, these are the marks of a creative mind working without regardless for the usual concerns of structural convention and audience comfort. While some may see these norms as a hindrance, formality and convention have there place. The picture, which Bassett referred to as “one of seven feature films completed in the last year,” is not a movie, not even really a documentary by any technical or traditional means. It is however a portrait, of a person and an idea of a place defined more by the ideas contained therein of the individuals who exist within it. Whether the ideas themselves are self-evident, or anymore valid than those of its detractors, the place itself remains self-reliant and justified to those who confirm themselves and the legitimacy of their lives with its concept.

If anything, the kinship between Bassett’s film and Ferrara’s film is glaring, the choppiness of both their styles or lack of style, the inherent weirdness of both seems to be their common ground, and perhaps exemplifies something in the place, something previously indescribable, something that just happens within its walls and the lives of those who pass through its doors. It is not always picture pretty, it is not by any means perfect or always interesting. In spite of the search for definition continuing, the one thing that is perfectly clear is that the place where Bob Dylan wrote “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and where Samuel Clemens and Nikola Tesla once regularly lunched, while perfect in its flawed history, is no longer what it was, just as much of New York City appears to be. In this realization however belies the question, is there any reason why it should be? For Sam Bassett, and more importantly, for Stanley Bard, we must assume the answer is no, if not entirely unnecessary in the first place. The question and the answer for them both appears to be the work, the work, the work. And be it a series of portraits or a piece of masking tape stretched late at night across 23rd st, there may be little difference, if any. Either way, Bassett seems urgent and with endless enthusiasm determined to show off his creations, of both worlds, to anyone and everyone who will pay notice. For that, he is to be commended. And for the privilege and shelter such a setting provides for creativity, Stanley Bard is to be regarded fondly and lauded for years to come.

Afterschool finally gets its day in the sun

Antonio Campos' Afterschool opened yesterday at the Cinema Village. Its been a long time coming for the film, which premiered in Cannes last year and screened locally at the forty-sixth New York Film Festival last fall. Nominated for a pair of Gotham Awards, this most astounding of American Independent debuts was finally picked up by IFC Films after a lengthy, rather passive-aggressive flirtation between the corporate indie giant and the film's duo of young producers, who surely didn't make their negative costs back on the IFC theatrical agreement. Over at Hammer to Nail I've written a review of the film that was first posted during the run up to last year's Gothams. Here too is an interview I conducted with Campos last fall.

On Chelsea on the Rocks

By Evan Louison

There are a great number of stepping stones through the rapids of taste and cinematic trend that must be surpassed in order for a filmmaker to transcend his own legend, his verifiable brand. These stepping stones are evident in the aesthetic path to captivating an audience as well, to convincing more sophisticated, cinema literate audiences to reach beyond their accumulated assumptions about a filmmaker, the stories that filmmaker chooses to tell, and their own assumptions about themselves as people, which of course informs the way they watch movies. These are the challenges that each Abel Ferrara film now represents.

One of the last true unreformed gonzo geniuses from the now distant and distorted downtown era has painted something of a seamless yet confusing portrait of the Hotel Chelsea, one from which we can take and learn yet remain confused by. Baffled really. Depicting a vaguely defined cultural institution in Chelsea on the Rocks, the infamous and much maligned Chelsea Hotel, Mr. Ferrara's excesses and his singular vision are right their for us all to see. Subject to much debate and legend, the place itself has been through the ringer over the last few years as Stanley Bard, its longtime manager, part owner and symbol of its lifeblood, is now in a sideline position. Stanley watches with dismay for much of the story as his beloved Hotel, a home for creative and eccentric types from all walks of life, begins to shift and disintegrate in the hands of a new, profit driven management. It is no longer the mecca, a shelter for both the counterculture and the merely fronting, that it once supposedly was.

Nostalgia for its past and uncertainty for its future are illustrated, with much reminiscing from such luminaries as R. Crumb, Rockets Redglare, Milos Forman & Dennis Hopper (who mercifully seems to not hold his experience on the set of The Blackout against the director any). Notable, more reent Chelsea Hotel figures like Lola Schnabel and Ethan Hawke (who made a regrettable narrative feature in its hallowed halls) also turn up. Quentin Crisp shows up for a second if you can spot him, and the memorable footage of William S. Burroughs personally defacing one of his books for a giddy and childlike Warhol also makes an appearance. The picture itself is bound to appear dizzying more than likely to most viewers. Yet thankfully Ferrera avoids many of the cliches of the contemporary reverential documentary, with their easily digestible, Phillip Glassesque codas.

The film traffics in three modes; beautiful, richly hazy archival footage of the Hotel’s hayday, contemporaneous interviews with B roll footage of the Hotel, and chaotic, often unfortunate, sometimes just barely audible recreations of notorious moments in its past that have become part and parcel to its legendary status. These moments include a bizare glimpse of a drugged out Janis Joplin in a bathroom arguing with an unnamed man and the infamous night that the most well-known hanger-on in the history of rock stars, Nancy Spungen, died of a stab wound that was attributed to her boyfriend/benefactor, Sid Vicious. Jamie Burke as Vicious isn’t nearly as bad as some have said. In fact, in terms of quality (or more accurately, a lack of quality) he doesn’t hold a candle to Bijou Phillips, who when not demonstrating how nice her singing voice is, should probably not speak; this suggestion stands also for the incredibly miscast Adam Goldberg as a venomous drug dealer and Giancarlo Esposito, who barely gets to speak here, as his lackey. Esposito , an incredible actor, somehow still steals the scene as the only compelling face of the bunch (Burke’s model perfect mug is unseen as Sid was, in Abel’s theory, unconscious at the time of the assault).

Regardless, these often silly recreations create an easy path through which to attack the film, if also a less than fair one. There is a fascinating, almost magical moment that occurs at the phi point, about two thirds of the way through this often difficult documentary, that has incredible power. It is also one which caught me off guard, startled me completely, and for a reason I did not realize until much later, completely threw me. There are many moments in cinema like this one, ones where we lose ourselves within them, and our ideas dissolve and drip away. They don’t always come out of nowhere in the way that they do here however.

A Vietnam veteran speaks directly to the camera, telling all manner of memories from battle, ones that might stand to chill even the most hardened listener, and certainly to pull even the most disinterested to the edge of their seats, desperately straining to hear and understand a truly mysterious inclusion in this much larger, and densely packed series of ruminations on the iconic 23rd Street Inn. It is his tone, his caged eyes and his words that demands attention, not just for the gravity of his narrative, one which Abel would recall to me during the course of an evening last fall, which we documented in the run-up to his 2006 film Mary’s US release, but for its place in the larger structure of this quickly disappearing cultural institution. This was a place that would house movie stars and Statesmen, but also people like this. He is a beam in the rafters, set in place long after the stones are laid upon the foundation. He'll be long forgotten once the furniture is moved in and out again.

NYFF09 - Dispatch #1: On Wild Grass and many others

In these uncertain times, it’s impossible to talk about this year’s New York Film Festival in a vacuum that only considers its usual lineup of stalwart international auteurs. While the forty-seventh annual fest, one which has the reputation as the most self-aggrandizing, high falutin’ (and yet well respected) film event on New York’s cinema calendar, kicked off with octogenarian Alain Resnais delightfully absurd Wild Grass and a party in the renovated Alice Tully Hall’s brand new reception space (one which was much harder to penetrate uninvited than the opening night party’s previous home at Tavern on the Green), the doomsday predictions continued as insiders fret endlessly about the health of the independent film industry here in the States. As Scott Macaulay reported over at Filmmaker Magazine's blog, an unprecedented gathering of the indie film establishment’s most vaunted names took place at MoMA to discuss the problem on Friday. With everyone all gussied up for the veritable specialty film prom that is the NYFF’s opening night party, what better time to ruminate on the bad news that their standard of living, if not indie cinema itself, might be unsustainable.

Mr. Resnais probably couldn’t care less. His films are paid for in large part with government subsidies in European countries that prioritize cinema far more than we do in the States. His producers will happily take a low-ball offer from IFC; the US is just another territory to them. Fortunately for filmgoers, his new film is a definite improvement over his last outing with favorite late career star Andre Dussollier, the dreadfully baroque, slackly paced Private Fears in Public Places. He’s not growing any more refined as a filmmaker at 87, but he’s shirked off his trademark austerity for an accessible, vividly expressive melodramatic cinema that doesn’t take itself seriously at all and is, as Resnais’ films have always been, delirious with the possibilities of the medium to suggest varied states of consciousness.

As fun as it is, with a resolution largely borrowed from Jules et Jim and sizzling, colorful work from France’s greatest DP Eric Gautier, Wild Grass’ curiously familiar roster of French stars (Emmanuelle Devos, Matthew Amalric and Anne Consigny) and mad cap sensibility is Resnais’ attempt not to bite Trauffaut so much as it is to bite Desplechin, who he named checked in a stellar post screening Q&A. Of course Desplechin is often biting techniques and brash tonal changes from Trauffaut’s bag of tricks, albeit with panache that makes it all his own. Still, employing half the cast of A Christmas Tale, as fun as they are, only makes sense if you’re going to give them roles that satisfy our desire for their company. Amalric and Devos are largely on the sidelines, while Consigny’s character doesn’t have an emotional logic that makes a thread of sense. Dussollier and co-star Sabine Azema do their best with characters that feel half thought through.

Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere finds the talented Italian director, long overshadowed by his countrymen Bertolucci, Olmi and Moretti, in solid if unremarkable form. Recounting in a slightly overstuffed yet tremendously acted biopic how Mussolini’s seduction and post World War I abandonment of his first wife mirrored the fascist dictators’ love affair and betrayal of his homeland, Bellocchio tells the story too briskly, undercutting the emotional weigh of the narrative, and relies too much on stock archival footage that contrasts the real Mussolini with the both more and less remarkable fictional incarnation.

Encompassing over twenty-years of fairly complicated history in a two hour, twenty-minute movie is tricky and Vincere clearly suffers from trying to cover so much ground that the elements which would have allowed the story to register as tragedy just don’t congeal in the rush to explore all the story threads. With an at times needlessly elliptical editing style, Bellocchio so quickly stages the courtship, sex life and marriage of Mussolini and Ida Dalser (played by the luminous Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno), that we don’t get settled in our protagonist’s affection and trust of the man. Why was Dalser, whom Mussolini impregnated before leaving for war, willing to subject herself and her child to such abuse and torture from a man she still claimed to love after he abandoned and imprisoned her? Why Il Duce’s wartime love affair and subsequent marriage to the woman who nursed him back to health not given some dramatic heft and allowed to play more fully into a dramatized decision making process? Suddenly he just hates Dalser and decides to jettison her. There isn’t enough pre War set up for us to see Mussolini as a genuinely tragic figure. Likewise, its impossible to grasp their relationship as something that she would be so willing to fight for and metaphorically as symbolic of Mussolini’s betrayal of Italy. Bellocchio's gifts seems to work better in kammerspiel pieces like Good Morning, Night than on epic canvasses such as this.

Bruno Dumont was a middle-aged man when he began to make films, but given that Hadewijch is just his fifth film, he still feels like something of a l’enfant terrible. He certainly styles himelf as one, doing his best to infuriate audiences at every turn. His most confounding effort yet, Hadewijch centers on a wealthy French girl named Celine, who when we meet her is living in a convent and starving herself because of her unquenchable love of the lord. Kicked out of the convent by a duo of concerned Nuns who think her faith needs to be tested in the real world, she’s distraught to return to her government minister father’s Parisian palace. Placed within this spiritual void, she spends her days praying and rebuffing the advances of boys. Ultimately however, if we are to belive the incredible cynical logic of this exercise in nihilism, her love for Jesus is so profound that she chooses (spoiler ahead) to join a pair of dusky Muslim who live in the Parisian slums on a suicide bombing of the Parisian subway system complete with bad CGI.

Huh? Wha? Really? French Catholic Girls for Jihad! I can see the t-shirts now. To say that Dumont doesn’t earn this plot twist through the emotional mechanics of his characterizations is an understatement. Handsomely mounted, with the director’s trademark hints of lyricism, his heady mix of the profane and the profound, his subversion of Robert Bresson’s career project continues unabated and unchallenged. Dumont’s is a spiritual cinema that is so divorced from the actual practices of rank and file religious people that when he finally attempts to depict one, he has no idea what to do with her. After a marvelous first hour, Dumont’s misbegotten instincts ruin what could have developed into classic.

Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a film that I admire more than I like. It doesn’t really want to be liked. I’m rooting for it in a way. I think people should see it, if just so witness how terrific an actress Charlotte Gainsbourg is Yes, it’s a despairing as Roger Ebert has claimed, although it’s not quite riveting enough for over two-thirds of its running time to truly be midnight movie material. It’s basically Von Trier deciding to make a Takashi Miike film. That’s fine. I still don’t know what all the fuss is about. Yes, Charlotte drills a hole through Bill Dafoe’s leg and attaches what looks to be a weight set to it. Yes, there is an explicitly glimpsed female castration late in the third act. So what? This film feels like a throwaway for its immensely talented director, as he’s readily admitted in several interviews. The notoriously travel averse auteur won’t be journeying to Lincoln Center, so you’ll just have to catch him on Skype (live, from his basement, in his underwear, Lars!) or check out the next issue of Filmmaker if you’re looking for some sort of explanation.

The most satisfying film of the festival thus far has to be Cornelieu Poromboiu’s absurd anti-policier Police, Adjective. This droll and highly comic movie, centering on a cop charged with the thankless task of doing surveillance on high school kids smoking pot near a local kindergarten, it slows the dynamics of the Police Procedural to a crawl, showing how such a small and pointless task can grow into an administrative nightmare in which local law enforcement will ruin lives just to save face. A worthy follow up to his equally troubling and amusing 12:08 East of Bucharest, it continues Romania’s rapid emergence on the world cinema scene. Just as capable of being infuriating as it is laugh out loud funny, it suggests the ways Totalitarianism is an ethic informed mainly by an abuse of language and procedure.

Quicktakes: On Disgrace, Fatal Promises, Harmony and Me

Despite being a prize winner at Toronto last year and its impressive literary pedigree (J.M. Coetzee’s Booker prize winning novel is the source), I wasn’t expecting much from Disgrace. Maybe John Malkovich’s last top lining foray into a smallish “indie”, the morbidly unfunny and demeaning The Great Buck Howard, left a bad taste in my mouth. Or maybe, having not read the novel but being quite familiar with its story and themes, I was expecting the film to cop out, to not reach for the difficult truths Coetzee is trying to grapple with in South Africa’s dark and damaged heart.

At once provincial and accessible, it's a look into post-Apartheid psychosexual dynamics that threaten to swallow whole a white Afrikaner, a literature professor (Malkovich in top form) living in Johannesburg, who loses his job after a clandestine affair with a largely disinterested black student. First timer Steve Jacobs, while certainly no budding visual maestro, has given us a film that doesn’t shy away from presenting a country where white men like our protagonist, used to wielding their power over women and minorities both, have ceded control of the means of governance and production and must now deal with chickens that are coming home to roost sooner and in more morally troubling ways than they ever imagined. I won’t say more, but this is a film worth seeing and thinking about late into the night.

Fatal Promises, a new documentary about human trafficking from director Kat Rohrer, isn’t going to tell you anything the Dateline NBCs, Nightlines and 20/20s won’t. Dotting around the globe interviewing the formerly enslaved, those who have worked in this treacherous industry and the various individuals who are trying to stop this dastardly practice, Rohrer sticks to the issued oriented doc playbook pretty closely. Yes, talking heads galore. Although it's not breaking much new ground from a news standpoint and the aesthetics are simply pedestrian, the film does have its place in the dialogue and serves as a good primer for the uninitiated.

We trot out to conferences, listening to academics, NGO presidents and celebrities (Emma Thompson and Gloria Steinem among them) site statistics and invite us to ponder the human toll. We do, but as Susan Sontag once so elegantly pointed out, the suffering of others, especially as rendered in photography, will always seem remote to even the most empathetic viewer. It’s the responsibility of art that tackles matters of this gravity to make us care. While Fatal Promises doesn’t aspire to the level of artwork, it would need the same type of bracing impact to reach the level of affective advocacy. It doesn’t, but it was worth a try.



Don’t confuse Harmony and Me for a real movie, one with identifiable human beings pursuing recognizable goals. It is a cartoon. Nothing is at stake in its characters lives. No one has anything resembling values informed by experience and intuitive moral instinct. This cousin of mumblecore, featuring several of that already dead subgenres leading lights, it's a poorly executed attempt at free wheeling, low budget comedy. If only it were funny or insightful or a bit less mean spirited. If only the camera where not on auto-focus. Does the term, cinematography mean anything you, Mr. Byington? The film includes scores of performers I’ve found interesting a variety of different contexts (Kevin Corrigan, Pat Healy, Justin Rice, Alex Karpovsky), which only lends a greater sense of betrayal to the whole enterprise. Calling this filmmaking stretches the already malleable limits of that term even further.

On The Informant!

A small movie writ large on billboards and bus ads, The Informant! is no Erin Brockovich and that’s meant as a compliment. As confounding as any Soderbergh film since Schizopolis, it’s not even risky for a studio to drop it, with the nationwide roll out and the bought and paid for fanfare, late in September, like its Bourne 7. Of course, Archer-Daniels-Midland are scum. Not like Warners really cares, which is why this oddly topical movie given our impending food crisis doesn’t mention a whiff of what it's really about in its beautifully constructed marketing campaign. Who would have ever thought big agribusiness/biotech price fixing would make for high end postmodern deconstruction of the Corporate Espionage Thriller bankrolled and P&A’d with studio checks?

This is the release you earn by making enough smart, semi-bankable high-end studio product in between your arty clunkers and genuine successes. Of course, it must have Matt Damon. A savvy casting move in both the commercial and aesthetic realms (not a thrown away beat the whole film, a whole, satisfying performance, every bit as good as his continents apart but oddly similar Tom Ripley), Soderbergh’s real coups are his deft 80s TV pastiche (Scott Bakula and music right out of Magnum P.I.), his feel for Midwestern mores (a place where sweetheart sociopaths bloom and the protestant work ethic lives on) and his this is real life or simply a Zodiac/Sexybeast mash up place and time inter titles, thrown at us in a zany pink that’s tackier that Mark Whitacre’s ties.

Damon’s voice over proves Mr. Whitacre to be the most amusing and thoroughly American unreliable narrator in recent cinematic memory. I’ll take him as my whistle blower over Jeffery Wigand any day, even if it’s harder to buy Damon with a gut than it is Russell Crowe. The respectively Corporate and Legal thrillers of Michael Crichton and John Grisham prove to be our unselfconscious protag’s self-imposed framework for the proceedings he blunders and lies his way through. Midwestern corn syrup hawks are bound to have lousy taste in fiction.

This is not a comedy to laugh at so much as its one to grin and scoff at, resting ultimately in the satisfying if melancholy tinged knowledge that the world is as grim and cruel and yet somehow still worth fighting for as you often imagine it to be. Left to wonder what Soderbergh would have done with the baseball wonks of Moneyball, having twice rebuilt another fragile subgenre for our age of cynicism and absurdity I now call for Amy Pascal’s resignation, but I suppose we have a better shot at The Public Option clearing the retirement home for millionaires otherwise known as the US Senate.

Screenings About Town, 9/11-9/13

Having recently returned from an end of the summer sojourn to the provinces, I've found that the first weekend of fall offers too many cinematic choices to make any sort of informed and rational decision about what to go see (again). While many in this city will understandably spend much of this rainy Friday ruminating on the eighth anniversary of our countries' violent, headfirst plunge into the 21th century, ponder attending some of the terrific, little seen films on display in New York all weekend. Among the highlights:

Margarita Jimeno's electrifying portrait of the NYC based, Eastern-Euro flavored, rock act act Gogol Bordello opens at the Cinema Village today. In Gogol Bordello Non-Stop, she follows Eugene Hutz (star of Madonna's Filth and Wisdom) and his wacky, multi-ethnic band of Gypsy Punks to venues around the globe. While the doc doesn't push the envelope aesthetically, her subjects are never less than entertaining. Here's an interview with Jimeno I conducted last year for Spout.

Rooftop Films closes its 2009 season with a pair of shorts blocks, narratives on Friday and New York non-fiction on Saturday. Having fallen short of their 2009 fund raising goals, this indelible non-profit screening series and granting institution could certainly use your support, but the real reason to go tonight is to see a bevy of fantastic shorts, including two of my favorites from this year. Don Hertzfeldt's I Am So Proud of You, his award winning follow up to the Sundance winning short Everything Will Be Ok was made with financial support from the Rooftop Filmmakers Fund and is every bit as impressive as his previous effort. Meanwhile, 25 New Face Dustin Cretton's heartbreaking 2009 Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner Short Term 12 will close the block.

MoMA opens Edwin's Blind Pig Who Wants to Fly for a week long run tonight. Check out the interview I conducted with the IFFR FIPRESCI Prize winner when the film had its US premiere at Rooftop Films in July.

On Saturday night the venerable Williamsburg based collaborative center for "non-fiction media research and group production" UnionDocs will screen the still undistributed 2008 Best Film Not Playing a Theater Near You winner Sita Sings the Blues. Nina Paley's delightful DIY animated musical hasn't been able to find many audiences outside of the festival circuit because of rights issues concerning the Annette Hanshaw songs used on its soundtrack. Trust that it is a one of a kind movie, buoyant and uplifting, so see it when and wherever you can. Here's an interview I conducted for Spout with Paley last year.