10.10.2003

The 41st New York Film Festival + Annemarie’s Screening!

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Date/Time: 10/10/2003 12:00 am


The 41st New York Film Festival
October 3-19, 2003
Highlights
Fri. Oct. 10, 9:15 pm 10B
Sat. Oct. 11, 12:30 pm 11A
LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES, Annemarie Jacir, 2003, Palestine, 17 min.
(followed by ELEPHANT, Gus Van Sant, 2003, USA, 81 min.)
Mon. Oct. 13, 9:00 pm 13B
Tue. Oct. 14, 6:00 pm 14A
CRIMSON GOLD
Jafar Panahi, 2003, Iran, 97 min. A Wellspring Media Release
Wed. Oct. 15, 9:00 pm 15B
Thu. Oct. 16, 6:00 pm 16A
DISTANT
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2003, Turkey, 110 min. A New Yorker Films Release
Fri. Oct. 17, 6:00 pm 17A
Sat. Oct. 18, 9:30 pm 18D
RAJA
Jacques Doillon, 2003, France, 112 min.
Screenings at the Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center
165 West 65th Street, between Broadway & Amsterdam Ave
Subway: 1, 9 to 66th St-Lincoln Center.
bus: M5, M7 and M104 all stop in front of Lincoln Center.
Tickets available at the box office: M-Sa 11-6pm Su 12-6pm
most tickets are $15 (212) 875-5050
For complete festival schedule and information, please visit:
http://www.filmlinc.com/nyff/nyff.htm
==================
LIKE TWENTY IMPOSSIBLES
Annemarie Jacir, 2003, Palestine, 17 min.
A film crew runs into trouble with an Israeli army patrol in this
startling cinema verite look at life during wartime.
In a shared taxi, conversations between a group of artists working on
a project meander from politics to love as landscapes of unspoiled
hills and crowded military checkpoints pass outside the windows. But
when they decide to avert a closed checkpoint by taking an unused side
road, the landscape unravels, and the passengers are slowly taken
apart by the mundane brutality of military occupation. “like twenty
impossibles” is both a visual poem and a narrative, marking the
emotional and material aspects of being a Palestinian living under
occupation.
followed by
ELEPHANT
Gus Van Sant, 2003, USA, 81 min. An HBO Films/Fine Line Features Release
Working with a cast of students who collaborated on the script and making
extraordinary use of an abandoned school in Portland, Oregon, Gus Van Sant
has created a tender and moving picture of the life of a high school in
the hours before catastrophe erupts. To call this simply a dramatization
of the Columbine massacre is not to do it justice. Tracking his young
characters through hallways and across athletic fields, capturing the
freshness and fragility of their smallest encounters and actions, Van Sant
elicits a sense of both the beauty of common experience and the festering
emotions capable of sweeping it all away. The performances of the student
actors are remarkable for their emotional truth, and the formally
inventive juxtaposition of simultaneous events creates a haunting sense of
fatality in the midst of the everyday.
Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes this year, Elephant is both profoundly
lyrical and profoundly unsettling.
10B Fri. Oct. 10, 9:15 pm
11A Sat. Oct. 11, 12:30 pm
CRIMSON GOLD
Jafar Panahi, 2003, Iran, 97 min. A Wellspring Media Release
This latest provocation by the politically courageous and visually
nimble Iranian director Jafar Panahi – last seen at the New York Film
Festival with 2000’s The Circle – explodes off the screen without the
camera ever moving. And yet the smash-and-crash jewel robbery with
which the film opens is really just a scream of anguish from its chief
character Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), whose history we learn via
flashback and a cleverly elegant script by Pahani collaborator Abbas
Kiarostami. Pizza delivery-man Hussein – veteran of the Iran-Iraq war,
victim of chemical warfare and casualty of his country’s short-term
memory – is a symbol for Panahi of Iran’s economic stagnation, the
unspoken cruelty of its class distinctions, and the embarrassments of
its past.
Hussein’s journeys through the streets of Teheran, laden with his and
his nation’s checkered histories, are funny, poignant and ultimately
devastating.
13B Mon. Oct. 13, 9:00 pm
14A Tue. Oct. 14, 6:00 pm
DISTANT
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2003, Turkey, 110 min. A New Yorker Films Release
From Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, whose Clouds of May
premiered in the 2001 New Directors/New Films festival, Distant is a
subtle and incisive character study of a big city photographer and his
rural cousin who has come to Istanbul looking for work – hopefully on
a ship that will take him away from his troubled country. The older
man’s disillusionment – he has been forced to abandon his artistic
ambitions to concentrate on commercial jobs – provides a funny and
revealing contrast to his young visitor’s naivet? and enthusiasm.
Shooting with a tiny, five-man crew (he is the film’s director, writer,
cinematographer and co-editor), Ceylan captures a profound feeling of
disaffection and emptiness without losing his sense of humor or his
emotional engagement with his characters. The two lead actors,
Muzaffer Ozdemir and Emin Toprak, shared the best actor prize at the
2003 Cannes Film Festival; the film itself won the Grand Jury Prize.
15B Wed. Oct. 15, 9:00 pm
16A Thur. Oct. 16, 6:00 pm
RAJA
Jacques Doillon, 2003, France, 112 min.
Jacques Doillon’s unpredictable, multi-layered film addresses the
difficult subject of two individuals trying to correct an imbalance of
power. Fredérique (Pascal Greggory, in a wonderfully intricate
performance) is a wealthy Frenchman who lives the life of a libertine
pasha in Morocco. Raja (Najat Benssallem) is one of the fetching local
girls who comes to work in his garden.
They set their sights on one another, and a battle of wits, libidos and
cultural perspectives ensues. Fred, the pampered, carefree imperialist,
slowly begins to comprehend the hard pragmatism of Raja’s life. Raja, the
cunning, tough-minded journeywoman, who has learned to use her sexuality
as the ultimate bartering tool, comes to understand Fred’s seriousness and
sense of rectitude.
And the closer they get, the further away they are from one another.
Doillon masterfully orchestrates this behavioral power struggle in
wonderfully warm images of dappled sunlight and vibrant color, with a
visual scheme that suggests Matisse. Few films have ever been sharper or
more alive to the warring realities and mentalities of the post-colonial
world.
17A Fri. Oct. 17, 6:00 pm
18D, Sat. Oct. 18, 9:30 pm