MUBI Update: 04 August 2011

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MUBI Update: 04 August 2011

MUBI‘s collaboration with the terrific Melbourne International Film Festival continues this week through Sunday, August 7, bringing free films from the festival’s 2011 lineup. Be sure to catch them before they’re gone! Here are some of our favorites:

Foreign Parts (Verena Paravel & J.P. Sniadecki, USA)

“A hidden enclave in the shadow of baseball’s new Mets Stadium, the neighborhood of Willets Point, Queens, is an industrial zone fated for demolition. Filled with scrapyards and auto salvage shops, lacking sidewalks or sewage lines, the area seems ripe for tourist development. But Foreign Parts discovers a strange community where wrecks, refuse and recycling form a thriving commerce. Cars are stripped, sorted and catalogued by brand and part, then resold to an endless parade of drive-thru customers. Joe, the last original resident, rages and rallies through the street like a lost King Lear, trying to contest his immanent eviction. Two lovers, Sara and Luis, struggle for food and safety through the winter while living in an abandoned van. Julia, the homeless queen of the junkyard, exalts in her beatific visions of daily life among the forgotten. The film observes and captures the struggle of a contested “eminent domain” neighborhood before its disappearance under the capitalization of New York’s urban ecology.” —Locarno

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden

Curling (Denis Côté, Canada)

“Denis Côté has long since staked out his territory as Canada’s most adventurous auteur. With Curling, he seeks to refine the terrain. A film about damaged individuals in a bleak landscape, it nevertheless has a sense of humour: a scene where an overprotective father and his sheltered daughter (Emmanuel and Philomène Bilodeau) listen to Tiffany chirp her way through “I Think We’re Alone Now” both establishes and makes fun of Côté’s preoccupation with isolation. And yet the film is, finally, concerned with the possibility, however faint, of community. How nice that Côté’s most accomplished film to date is also his most hopeful.” —Eye Weekly

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden

Jean Gentil (Laura Amelia Guzmán & Israel Cárdenas, Domican Republic)

“The Haitian professor Jean Remy Genty is always on the move, looking for work. A graceful figure, he stands out in the crowd: a model Christian. On his journeys we see the changing scenario of the city, its excessive development. Although a job on a building site is a possible option for the unemployed Haitian, Jean does not feel up to it, feeling old and weak. He is looking for something more suited to the intellectual he considers himself to be. And so he spends years looking for employment worthy of himself and his education. Jean starts to give up hope; he feels the natural need to grow, to have a home, a wife. His desires and thoughts become confused. Bad feelings start to grow within him, distorting his perception of everyday life…” —Venice

Available in: Everywhere!

Trypps #7 (Badlands) (Ben Russell, USA)

“Regarding LSD, brass bells, the youth of today, Terence Malick and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, phase cancellation, the Pine Ridge Reservation, and the Romantic Sublime. Part seven in a series of films about cinema and transcendence.” —Ben Russell

Available in: Everywhere!

Detroit Wild City (Florent Tillon, France)

“Welcome to the city of Detroit, ‘the Murder Capital of the USA’, where the grass is growing over the parking lots and the houses are abandoned. Here, a new life is slowly beginning to take form and take over the deserted city. But even if the writing on the wall has a different and more apocalyptic meaning, there is no reason to panic. Detroit Wild City looks with the wandering gaze and cool, philosophical distance of the outsider at the changes in urban landscapes in a historical moment when a ‘post-‘ is written before ‘utopias’, ‘humanity’ and ‘dollar capitalism’. Invisible disasters have ruined the city, and all that is left are traces in the form of radio adverts about debt relief, flocks of stray dogs, and a mysterious pile of burned New Age books. But on the fringes of it all, people have started to reorganize themselves in autonomous societies, where settlers are growing vegetables and still believe in the future – just not as an extension of the present. Florent Tillon keeps a level head and like a French Jim Jarmusch he turns his selective camera to where new ideas grow in the ruins of the 20th century’s belief in eternal progress. And where the knowledge that something new is going to happen is a rare piece of good news.” —CPH:DOX

Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden

Flower of Evil (David Dusa, France)

“Inspired by the innovative strategies Iranian students used to mobilize the green movement against government-imposed bans, David Dusa powerfully and viscerally binds a fictional romance with real footage collected from YouTube, Google Video, and Twitter, personalizing anonymous images of violence and testifying to the revolutionary potential of the Internet.” —Tribeca

Available in: Everywhere!

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