MUBI Update: 7 July 2011

This week’s update from MUBI includes a new micro-retrospective of a great filmmaker, as well as a local film festival collaboration coming from London.

London Indian Film Festival

MUBI is teaming up with the London Indian Film Festival, running through July, to present two films from the lineup for free. In Gaurav Pandey‘s Dry Red Chillies, viewable everywhere on the PlayStation 3, a middle-aged actor who’s only appeared on screen as an extra for decades, finally gets his big break. It’s a conscious nod to Satyajit Ray‘s The Philosopher’s Stone (1958). The lead’s played by Mithun Chakraborty, who tells the Times of India that the film is “about the dream of a common man, its not about me. The life of a common man is just like dry red chillies which do not have a taste of their own but are used to add flavor to the dish being prepared.”

The LIFF on Dr Biju Kumar‘s The Way Home (image above), viewable only in the UK: “Malayalam cinema’s young heartthrob Prithviraj plays a Delhi-based prison doctor who accedes to the dying wish of his patient, a member of a terrorist squad. Her wish is that he unites her five-year-old son with his father whom he has never seen. The trouble is that the father is the leader of a dreaded Indian Jihadi terrorist group.”

Available in: Everywhere!

In the Year of the Pig (Emilio de Antonio, US)

In the Year of the Pig (1968), nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, is a vital work from a preeminent force in independent film and political documentary. “The pig of the title is the US involvement in Vietnam, thoroughly roasted by Emile de Antonio‘s agitprop montage,” writes Fernando F Croce. “The theme of de Antonio’s tract, assembled with calm anger, is the ‘arrogance of power’ of the US colossus, dissected and questioned, the path carved for Hearts and Minds and Michael Moore down the decades, as locations change but the song remains the same.”

Available in: United Kingdom, Germany, Belgium, France and Switzerland.

Shoot the Piano Player (Francois Truffaut, France)

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Shoot the Piano Player (1960): “Considering how romantic it is, how sad and funny and charming, it is a sobering fact that François Truffaut’s second feature — and the first one that qualifies as a quintessential New Wave expression — was a disaster at the box office. Indeed, if this eccentric adaptation of David Goodis‘s 1956 crime novel Down There illustrated any general commercial principle, this may be that one subverts overall genre expectations at one’s peril. For Tirez sur le pianiste is a film noir that literally turns white (through such images as piano keys or a snowy hillside) when the plot is at its darkest, and one that sometimes interrupts the viewer’s laughter with a disquieting catch in the throat.”

Available in: Italy

Four films by Nina Menkes

“In the 25 years since her first feature, Magdalena Viraga [1986], Nina Menkes has remained one of the few American directors working at feature length whose films — in both form and thought — are genuinely radical,” Phil Coldiron wrote last month in the LA Weekly. “Menkes’s main preoccupation across her six films is violence in all its forms, and her approach, oblique yet intuitive, has yielded results that have more to say on the subject than any American director since Peckinpah or Cassavetes.”

Magdalena Viraga is one of four films you can now watch on MUBI from anywhere in the world, including her 1983 short The Great Sadness of Zohara. The other two features are Queen of Diamonds (1991), which prompted the Village Voice to write, “Menkes once again proves herself one of the more compelling voices in American film, an evocative cine-poet boldly pursuing a singular and highly personal vision”; and The Bloody Child (1996), of which Kevin Thomas wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “Brilliant… an awe-inspiring rigorous work of art on the highest level; one of the year’s top five films.” Gus Van Sant agreed, calling The Bloody Child “one of the year’s greatest films from one of my favorite filmmakers.”

Available in: Everywhere!