Art of the Real 2015

Opening Night Shorts Program

Q&A with João Pedro Rodrigues, João Rui Guerra da Mata, Eduardo Williams, and Matt Porterfield

Iec Long mixes archival footage, figurine reconstructions, and oral testimony in an eclectic depiction of a derelict Macao fireworks factory. The spellbinding and enigmatic I Forgot follows a group of Vietnamese teenagers as they stave off boredom by leaping from one building to the next. Take What You Can Carry is a delicate portrait of a young American woman in Berlin attempting to reconcile the need for stability with her itinerant lifestyle.

The Royal Road

Closing Night | Q&A with Jenni Olson followed by a reception open to all ticketholders

Essential San Francisco filmmaker Jenni Olson’s latest essay film is an associative, inquisitive meditation on love, remembrance, and California history structured around a trip down El Camino Real that riffs often and exquisitely on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil. Screening with Becoming Anita Ekberg (Mark Rappaport, 17m) and The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk (Mark Rappaport, 11m).

The Absent

Q&A with Nicolás Pereda

In this subtle, exquisitely photographed film by ambitious young Mexican writer-director Nicolás Pereda, an elderly man is revisited by old memories after losing his property and goes on a quest to resolve them. Screening with The Palace (Nicolás Pereda, 37m).

Afrique 50 and New Short Works

Q&A with Peggy Ahwesh and Basim Magdy

This program features new works by avant-garde artists Basim Magdy, Ben Russell, and Peggy Ahwesh, along with a key work from the late René Vautier, whose Afrique 50 remains one of the most vital and urgent examples of the camera’s power to write—and rewrite—history.

Androids Dream + Nova Dubai

Q&A with Ion de Sosa and Gustavo Vinagre

The haunting Androids Dream is simultaneously a meditation on Spain’s economic crisis and on terrorism (and a sly reimagining of Philip K. Dick’s seminal cyberpunk novel), while Nova Dubai follows a group of young gay Brazilian men as they candidly explore their desires, capitalism, family, and self-destructive impulses against the backdrop of an overdeveloped urban neighborhood.

Le Beau Danger

U.S. Premiere | Q&A with René Frölke and writer Norman Manea followed by a book signing

René Frölke’s mesmerizing, formally inventive portrait of the legendary Romanian writer Norman Manea doubles as a study of the day-to-day business of intellectual life (panels, book signings, interviews) and a sensitive meditation on the experience of exile.

Birds of September

North American Premiere

A thrilling new species of the city symphony, Sarah Francis’s feature debut, shot in Beirut from within a glass-walled van, is an empathetic attempt to capture the mood of a city—one block, and one person, at a time.

I, Kamikaze

Q&A with Masa Sawada

Masa Sawada’s riveting new film is essentially a one-man show: the uninterrupted spoken testimony of Fujio Hayashi, a 90-year-old Japanese World War II veteran who led—and, against all odds, survived—the first squadron of kamikaze pilots.

Kamen + Guided Tour

Introduction by René Frölke

Florence Lazar’s Kamen – The Stones illustrates an ongoing political injustice: an attempt by the Bosnian Serb Republic to erase the traces of the savage ethnic violence that decimated the region two decades ago. René Frölke’s Guided Tour sardonically chronicles then—German President Horst Köhler’s 2008 visit to the HfG Karlsruhe, the renowned university of fine arts.

Letter to a Father

North American Premiere

Featuring stunningly composed photography, Edgardo Cozarinsky’s understated, powerful documentary explores the legendary Argentine writer and director’s Russian-Jewish roots in the farming community where his father was born.

Li Wen at East Lake

North American Premiere | Q&A with Luo Li

Luo Li’s follow-up to Emperor Visits the Hell (ND/NF 2013) is arguably the finest work to date from one of the most distinctive voices in modern Chinese cinema: a grim, darkly comic picture of a modern China centered on a fictional detective’s rambles around Wuhan’s East Lake.

Naomi Campbel

North American Premiere | Q&A with Camila José Donoso

Nicolás Videla and Camila José Donoso’s sharply observed feature debut, a fictionalized account of a transgender woman’s struggles to finance her sex-change operation, is an imaginative embodiment of the trans-ness it celebrates: a documentary with the structure of a fictional character study.

Nighthawks

No film before this queer-cinema landmark had shown what it was like to be an openly gay man in 1970s London, making it a priceless artifact from a period when love, for many, could only be found furtively and in the dark.

Le Paradis

North American Premiere

Voted one of the 10 best films of 2014 by Cahiers du Cinéma, this series of domestic sketches, shot by the 83-year-old Alain Cavalier (Thérèse, Le Combat dans l’île) in his own home, is a subtle, serene, and deeply touching meditation on how it feels to approach life’s end.

Snakeskin

U.S. Premiere | Q&A with Daniel Hui

Projections of footage shot 52 years earlier, in 2014, by a cult member’s divine leader is paired with interviews about race and cinema with everyday Singaporeans in this ingenious compression of past, present, and future.

Trading Cities

North American Premiere | Q&A with Luísa Homem & Pedro Pinho

A masterpiece of social observation comparable to the Direct Cinema of Richard Leacock and Frederick Wiseman, the first collaboration between Portuguese documentarians Luísa Homem and Pedro Pinho is an anatomy of contemporary Cape Verde’s rapidly expanding tourism industry and the work done to sustain it.

White Out, Black In

Q&A with Adirley Queiros

Two men partially paralyzed by police violence in the 1980s describe living under institutionalized racism against a science-fiction backdrop in Adirley Queiros’s ingenious contemporary take on Afrofuturism.

Will You Dance with Me?

North American Premiere

Unseen until 2014, this remarkable document is the chief product of on-the-ground research that Jarman conducted on the London club scene in 1984: a haunted, transfixing study of one night at a gay bar in East London’s Mile End district.

Black Panthers and Other Short Works

Q&A with Agnès Varda

A selection of short documentaries by Agnès Varda: Black Panthers is a casual, open-air portrait of a bustling “Free Huey” rally in Oakland that arose from Varda’s transformative encounter with the Black Panthers in 1968; Ulysse is a stunning essay film and a wide-ranging, concentrically expanding inquiry into history, memory, politics, and place; Women Reply: Our Bodies Our Sex is a frank examination of how women are taking control over their bodies and lives; and the exuberant Salut les Cubains is sourced from the vast cache of photographs Varda shot during her 1962 trip to newly post-Revolution Cuba.

Daguerréotypes

Varda’s affable, curious portrait of her neighbors and acquaintances on Rue Daguerre, where she’d been living for decades, is at once one of her warmest movies and a slightly embittered reflection on “a woman’s creativity... smothered by the home.”

Documenteur

This docufiction hybrid and self-described “emotion picture,” made during Varda’s second L.A. sojourn as a companion piece to the documentary Mur Murs, is a frank reflection on estrangement, loneliness, and loss. An NYFF19 selection.

The Gleaners and I

Varda’s wondrous reflection on the art of scavenging is a catalog of subjects candid, unsettling, touching, and sublime, gathered and arranged—as only Varda could—into a curious, coherent whole. An NYFF38 selection.

Lions Love (… and Lies)

This erotic Californian odyssey, in which Warhol superstar Viva enters into a precarious ménage à trois with the writers of the musical Hair, was one of Varda’s boldest, goofiest reckonings with the American counterculture. An NYFF7 selection.

Mur Murs

With the murals scattered throughout L.A., Varda found a quietly brilliant way to get an outsider’s perspective on the city’s convoluted social, racial, and economic tensions. An NYFF19 selection.

La Pointe Courte

Varda was 25 when she shot her enormously influential debut feature, a marital drama set in a small coastal fishing village in Sète that many consider the first proper entry in what would become the Nouvelle Vague.

Dramatic Acts Program

Introduction by Jean-Paul Kelly

This program includes Simon Fujiwara’s acclaimed and personal Studio Pietà, Jean-Paul Kelly’s sharp and critical Service of the Goods, and two works by Ming Wong that absurdly and touchingly engage with the legacy of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Eat Fear and Learn German with Petra von Kant.

Edvard Munch

Peter Watkins’s magnum opus is an acutely intimate study of the great Norwegian painter who had a particularly acute sense for, as one character in the film puts it, “the mysterious anguish of life”—and the cathartic anguish of art.

Elisabeth Subrin Program

Post-screening discussion with Elisabeth Subrin, Thomas Beard, and Johanna Fateman

This program features several works by Elisabeth Subrin, including the re-release of Shulie (a re-creation of an unreleased, direct-cinema documentary about radical feminist Shulamith Firestone), as well as Lost Tribes and Promised Lands and Sweet Ruin.

Essayistic Acts: Une sale histoire + Las Meninas

This program pairs Jean Eustache’s bifurcated essay-film, in which a peeping tom confesses to finding a hole in the wall of a woman’s toilet, with Juan Downey’s adventurous, essayistic reflection on Velázquez's Las Meninas.

Political Acts Program

Introduction by Jenny Perlin

This program features Irina Botea’s Auditions for a Revolution, her fascinating attempt at reenacting the 1989 Romanian Revolution, as well as T.R. Uthco and Ant Farm’s The Eternal Frame and Jenny Perlin’s Transcript.

Reimagined Icons: Fresh Acconci + Grapefruit

Introduction by Cecilia Dougherty

This program pairs Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley’s wickedly funny restagings of legendary multimedia artist Vito Acconci’s most canonical pieces with a video work by Cecilia Dougherty that reimagines The Beatles as four women

What Farocki Taught + Inextinguishable Fire

Q&A with Jill Godmilow

This program pairs Harun Farocki’s seminal antiwar film, which explores the development of napalm by dramatizing the inner workings of Dow Chemical’s Michigan headquarters, with Jill Godmilow’s exquisitely precise, shot-for-shot remake, made nearly 30 years later.