Spotlight On: OFFscreen

Welcome back, my friends, to a new semester of OFFScreen, U.Va.’s one-stop shop for indie and foreign cinema. This season we’re showing 12 films likely to never be seen on the big screen outside Los Angeles, New York, and . . . Charlottesville. Here’s a primer for our upcoming features:

At Sea (2006, screening February 1): Bard College professor Peter Hutton has been making non-narrative features for nearly 40 years, and his latest, AT SEA, will dropping into port in Newcomb Theater on February 1. Non-narrative films are like naturalistic documentaries, aiming to capture as much of a subject as possible without overt commentary or plotting. Hutton’s film follows the last voyage of an oil tanker, bound across the Pacific for scrap in a Korea shipyard. Hutton started filming the feature clandestinely, sneaking into a California shipyard with a handheld 16mm camera.

Accompanying that piece will be Glory At Sea (2005), a short from the Court 13 film collective. The fantasy asks, what if the loved ones lost in Hurricane Katrina were simply trapped beneath the ocean? Those left behind, desperate for redemption, build a ship to find out the truth.

Water Lillies (2007, screening February 8): First-time director Céline Sciamma’s feature from France has raised more than a few eyebrows with its frank depictions of teenage sexuality. Marooned in the suburbs of Paris for the summertime, three fifteen year-old girls explore their sexuality in a film that begs to be included in discussions of the sexualization of children. No trenchcoats please.

That night we’ll also show The Adventure before the main feature. A short film from Mike Brune, it follows a conventional bourgeois couple on an idyllic picnic in the park. Little do they know that the woods hide an unknown menace: mimes.

The Goodtimes Kid and Momma’s Man (2005 and 2008, showing February 15): Azazel Jacobs burst on to the indie film scene with the first film, his 2005 debut, made in L.A. after he graduated from the American Film Institute. Inspired in equal parts by Godard and Public Image, Inc., the film features a strong collaboration with rising director Gerardo Neranjo, whose new picture I’m Gonna Explode was the heartbreaker of this season. Try as we might to have OFFscreen be the site of that film’s U.S. theatrical premiere, it simply wasn’t in the cards (at least, not yet).

Jacobs’s Momma’s Man has received strong reviews. It’s a tale of middle-aged son who simply can’t leave home when comes for a short visit. Shot inside Jacobs’s childhood Brooklyn flat, it stars his real-life parents, Flo and Ken Jacobs, himself an experimental filmmaker. We had hoped to host Azazel to helm this double-feature, but when plans fell through, he was kind enough to grace us with the interview across the page.

Dreams of Dust (2006, screening February 22): OFFScreen has long enjoyed the privilege of showing the final film of U.Va.’s annual Francophone Film Festival; this year is no exception. This season’s selection is an African French-language film. Directed by Laurent Salgues, Dreams of Dust features a Nigerian immigrant seeking work in the exhausted gold mines of Burkina Faso. The film rectifies a long-standing absence of African films and filmmakers in OFFscreen’s schedule. Fun fact: Nigeria possesses the third-largest film industry in the world, and Burkina Faso comes in second for the African continent. Suffice it to say that Dreams is only a taste of the quality cinema coming from that part of the world, one we’re glad to host.

Another Court 13 short film, Death to the Tinman, will be screen alongside Dreams of Dust. Shot by Ran Tintori—his senior film at Wesleyan University—Death is an adaptation of a Frank L. Baum novel about the Tinman we all know and love, and how he lost his heart. Who would expect that he was a fireman, revolutionary, and playboy along the way? Highly recommended for fans of Guy Maddin.

Red Bucket Presents . . . (2008, showing Sunday, March 15): This evening of shorts, street observations, and non-narrative pieces from Brooklyn’s Red Bucket, a film collective unequaled in the United States for its humor and attention to cinematic detail. OFFscreen is showing a self-curated selection of films from these recent Boston University grads that has never before been attempted. Cut straight onto DVCAM, come to see a unique collection of shorts that NYC galleries would beg for.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed (2008, screening March 22): They may be young, but Red Bucket’s directors, Josh and Ben Safdie, have already taken the film world by storm. Red Bucket’s debut feature film, Pleasure—directed by Josh—was the only American film selected for the 2008 Cannes Directors’ Fortnight, a prestigious collection of work by new directors. It was screened with brother Ben’s short, The Acquaintances of a Lonely John, which OFFScreen will include in Red Bucket Presents . . . Channeling the whimsy and presence of the actresses of the French New Wave like Jeanne Moreau, star and co-writer Eleonore Hendricks plays an uninhibited thief on the street of Brooklyn.

Funky Forest: The First Contact (2007, screening March 29): One of the films suggested at our early meetings was A Taste of Tea, a pastoral focused on family life in rural Japan. Tea made it to DVD before we could screen it; perhaps you’ve seen it. Funky Forest, the follow-up from director Katsuhito Ishii, has not received even an inkling of theatrical distribution, languishing instead on DVD. OFFscreen is proud to have scored the only 35mm print in America. To prove once and for all how far the medium of film can be pushed, like Luis Buñuel for the You- Tube generation, Forest defies description— it is at least a mashup of bizarre skits, songs, costumes, and mayhem. Not recommended for pregnant women or those with motion sickness.

The first film in our “Projecting Directing” series is Fassbinder’s Beware of a Holy Whore (1971, showing April 5) . In the tradition of well-known classics—Fellini’s 8 ½, Godard’s Contempt, and Altman’s The Player—cuts to the heart of the filmmaking enterprise without solipsisitically missing the point. Beware of a Holy Whore is one of the German director’s strongest; it charts the slow descent of a German film set into druggy chaos. A leading light of New German Cinema, Fassbinder made over forty films, but he never made a movie as biting and personal Holy Whore. The director cited it as his greatest film shortly before his premature death at the age of 37. Not to be missed for its barbed, borderline-nihilistic take on art and the people who make it.

Stardust Memories (showing April 12) Reviled by his fans upon its release, Woody Allen’s 1980 film cuts a deep question mark into the minds of those who watch it. Designed to throw off fans of his ‘early, funny films’, Stardust Memories ends up an open-ended rumination on love and the value of art. Allen tosses Fellini references left and right in an attempt to find a path to salvation on celluloid. The film’s greatest achievement is Allen’s egomaniacal, crazed portrayal of himself. Given the task of depicting himself (intentionally, for one), Woody shows amazing restraint; the result is most controlled outing of his prolific career. Allen cites Stardust as one of his own favorites; we have to agree: as he says in the film, “[t]he only areas in life you can have absolute control are art and masturbation, and I am an expert in both.”

Inland Empire (2006, screening April 19): We end the season with a bang—a show of David Lynch’s most recent feature, Inland Empire. Those who have already caught the film on DVD may question why OFFscreen is showing the film nearly three years after its initial release. The answer: Charlottesville has yet to receive a theatrical screening of Empire, one of the best films of the decade, and because Lynch’s work of exquisite hyper-reality deserves to be seen on 35mm. Come early—I’ll bet we’ll sell out.

OFFScreen shows independent, classic, and foreign films in Newcomb Hall Theater on Sunday nights at 7 and 9:30 p.m. Tickets are three dollars at the door, and memberships can be purchased at the show for a season pass. The next movie in the lineup is At Sea, directed by Peter Hutton, which screens this Sunday, February 1. See a full version of OFFScreen’s schedule on page 20 of this issue for future films and dates.

I was also able to ask a few questions of Azazel Jacobs, whose films The GoodTimes Kid and Momma’s Man— which stars his parents and is set in their home—will screen Sunday, February 15.

Why did you cast Matt Boren, instead of yourself, in a role that is apparently so close to your own experiences?

A few reasons: I am not an actor and don’t have any wish to be. I acted (hardly) in The GoodTimesKid out of necessity; there was no other way to make the film. So for me to tell the story I wanted, I needed a real actor and wrote [the role] for Matt Boren from the first line on (I worked with him on something else I made a bunch of years ago). This kind of leads into the second part of why I didn’t act—it’s not all my story. There are as many unfamiliar things in there as there are familiar, and the last thing I wanted to focus on was myself—I would be bored quickly, and I would never trust myself to show something I wouldn’t want to. So while [the film is set in] the place I grew up, those are my parents, the old best friend is my old best friend, and, like Mikey, I live in Los Angeles—he is a businessman who seems to never have seen the value in his parents, the way he was raised, and what they did. Having a character like that gave me a lot more to dive into and explore. If it was my honest story, it would be about a son that returns home to make a film with his parents, and, though I wouldn’t mind seeing that, I didn’t want to make it. Anyway, trying to get in the mind of someone that opted for a 9-5 was actually much more self revealing—in terms of my aims and desires—than I expected. The hate letter is real, the songs are not.

What was it like to direct your parents, Flo and Ken Jacobs, who have collaborated previously on their own films?

At first it was very odd, and I thought to make it easier I would step in for Mikey whenever he was off-screen. But it quickly became clear I was just slowing down Matt and my parents’ relationship from evolving, and I stepped out of the way. Things became normal after that, which I guess is strange, but while we were shooting, it was a work relationship between me and my folks. They were fun to be around, and I think they got a kick out of just seeing their son doing his thing in front of them. Of course they had seen my films and seen me prepping or cutting them, but never actually directing. The biggest issue between us was the name “Mikey.” My father hated saying it, said there was no chance in hell they’d name a child that, and would continually call out some other name he’d rather while we were shooting, which I had to cut around later on. It wasn’t until later, after seeing the completed film, that I realized how incredibly generous and trusting it was to allow me not only shoot in their home but to use them as actors.

What kind of technical limitations were caused by shooting in your parents’ apartment? Did they live there during shooting?

The technical limitations were great ones. The one rule me and the cinematographer, Tobias Datum, had was that we would not move anything. I wanted things recorded the way they were, so that whenever I visited the film, the place would be how I remembered. It forced us to shoot around and through things, which is one of the things I love in the film. My parents did stay in the place while shooting, as did I in the bedroom. In the end, I think it also added another nice layer to the film, whether it’s clearly apparent or not.

You worked closely with director Gerardo Naranjo during the entire production of The Good- TimesKid. Any chance for a follow-up collaboration?

Yes. Absolutely. Except, while we weren’t “kids” then, we definitely aren’t now, and will only be older when we shoot together again. But making that film with both him and my girlfriend Diaz was one of the best times in my life and I already have the first scene for the next one. It opens with Depresso at war.

What can we look forward to in your next project?

Everything I am working on (and there are about three stories in my mind at the moment) are all about people and places I don’t know. Momma’s Man has been great to and for me, I need to heed some of what I learned on it with the next one, including the need to leave home.