MUBI Update: 26 January 2012

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MUBI Update: 26 January 2012

my french film festival

My French Film Festival continues!
Firstly, a time-sensitive reminder: there’s still a week remaining in our unique collaboration with the My French Film Festival. The festival, which includes both short films and features, emphasizes the work of exciting new French filmmaking talent. The festival continues to run online on MUBI through February 1, 2012.
west of the tracks
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (Wang Bing, China)
Parts 1 (Rust), 2 (Remnants) & 3 (Rails).
This one I’m really, really happy to announce. We’re showing it in Benelux but I wish we were showing it worldwide. Still: if you live there please see this film. It is without a doubt one of the most important films created in the last decade. This documentary is long, nearly ten hours, so treat it like a mini-series or television series.
As the New Yorker said upon a rare New York-based screening: “West of the Tracks [is] an extraordinary (and extraordinarily long—nine hours and sixteen minutes) documentary by the Chinese director Wang Bing, from 2003. Its subject is the economic and social breakdown of a remote industrial region.” The New York Times writes that the film “is an astonishingly intimate record of China’s painful transition from state-run industry to a free market. Filming between 1999 and 2001, Mr. Wang and his sound engineer, Lin Xudong, painstakingly document the death throes of the Tie Xi industrial district in the city of Shenyang, in northeast China, a once-vibrant symbol of a thriving socialist economy. As factories close and workers lose not only their jobs but also their homes and social networks, the filmmakers patiently observe the end of an era and the fortitude of those left floundering in its wake.”
“Capturing moments both large and small — a blast-furnace ‘mishap,’ a plaintive song on the radio asking ‘Baby, aren’t you tired of this yet?’ — this profoundly empathetic and humanist work bears witness to a vanished way of life and the real cost of progress. ‘Get this place on film now, because it won’t be around much longer,’ advises one of Mr. Wang’s stoic factory workers. Luckily for us, he did.”
Available in: Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg
reservoir dogs
Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, USA)
What more can be said about this film? One of the most impressive feature debuts in film history, and instantly emblematic of its auteur’s style: cinephilia (knowledgeable of and referencing the history of film), suffuse with pop culture and how it defines the interactions of people, rich genre heritage (here, gangster-heist films), vibrant characters and unexpected casting, concise but potent violence, and a structurally fragmented narrative. The cult of Tarantino was born in an instant and continues to this day. See why, here.
Available in: Germany, Austria, Switzerland
zero bridge
Zero Bridge (Tariq Tapa, India)
This incredible film is a hopeful, human portrait of a teen pickpocket whose chance encounter with one of his victims upends his escape plans in this gritty, moving story about daily life in Kashmir. It is the first dramatic narrative feature film about contemporary daily life in the Indian-controlled city of Srinagar, Kashmir. It was filmed entirely on location with a local cast of first-time, non- professional actors performing in their native Kashmiri language by a technical crew of one: the director. It played at the Venice and Karlovy Vary film festivals, among others. It is a “moving slice of life from a corner of the world usually seen only in news reports or as a mountainous backdrop for Bollywood musicals” (NY Times).
Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway
the immaculate conception
The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle (David Russo, USA)
The New York Times says this Sundance Film Festival selection “is like Clerks reimagined by William S. Burroughs. Looking as if it were devised on acid and executed on mushrooms, this imaginative debut feature from the Seattle artist and filmmaker David Russo finds meaning in cleaning and life in dead ends.”
“An idiosyncratic pondering on the soul-sucking limbo of cubicle careers, the story follows Dory (Marshall Allman), a data-entry drone in Seattle who abandons his computer to join a free-range crew of janitor-philosophers. But after snacking on chemically enhanced cookies from the offices of a product-research company, the male members of the crew, led by the aspiring artist O C (a splendid Vince Vieluf), discover that they have more to worry about than hallucinations and intestinal distress.”
“Juxtaposing white-collar callousness with brown-collar invisibility, Mr. Russo — who worked as a janitor for 11 years — picks at society’s pecking order with inventive zeal. Throwaway jokes and eccentric visual effects (including a trippy sequence by the Dutch animator Rosto) propel a story that weaves faith, creation and cruddy commodes into a psychedelic riff on sex roles and class structure. In the background, a group of musicians collectively known as Awesome lives up to its name.”
“Off the wall yet completely intelligible, Immaculate Conception mines existential commentary from toilet humor. ‘There’s also toilet sadness, toilet triumph, toilet a lot of things,’ O C points out to curious patrons at a show of his bathroom-centric art. A janitor ought to know.”
Available in: United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden

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