I dream of genre: Tribeca Festival films nature footage.
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April 10, 2014
COOL FOREIGN FILMS
COPYRIGHT: PARADOX / PHILIP ØGAARD
werker uses interviews with colorful family members and Coney Island characters to show how his immigrant grandfather’s American dream became a culinary reality — and a cultural touchstone. Tribeca Film Festival alum Jeff Reichart — whose 2010 documentary “Gerrymandering” scrutinized the redistricting process — teams up with Farihah Zaman for “This Time Next Year.” Together, they document the efforts of Long Beach Island, New Jersey residents to recover from Superstorm Sandy in time for the make-or-break summer season. Set in the American West, “Fishtail” has another group battling the elements and changing times, in a bid to maintain their way of life. Narrator Harry Dean Stanton’s voice gives gravitas (and gravel) to this unsentimental portrait of Montana’s Fishtail Basin Ranch cowboys, as they navigate another calving season. Cultural preservation is the goal of “Tomorrow We Disappear.” When high-rise developers purchase the land occupied by New Delhi’s Kathputli colony of puppeteers, performers and magicians, an already vanishing form of Indian folk art is threatened with extinction. “We are the flying birds,” they tell the filmmakers, “here today and gone tomorrow.” “The Overnighters” finds a small conservative North Dakota town overwhelmed by the influx of desperate men in search of employment, when hydraulic fracturing uncovers a rich oil field. The compassion shown to them by a local pastor soon puts him at odds with those who don’t embrace the church’s far-reaching “love thy neighbor” policy. James “The Amazing” Randi gets some long-overdue love, in “An Honest Liar.” For the better part of his 50-year career, Randi has been
Norway’s winter white is about to get a good coating of blood. See “In Order of Disappearance.”
exposing con artists who use the professional magician’s bag of tricks to hoodwink and swindle the gullible masses. Hated by faith healers, fortune-tellers and gurus (including self-professed spoonbender Uri Geller), Randi’s masterful debunking of these phonies has earned the admiration of Penn Jillette, Bill “The Science Guy” Nye and “Mythbuster” Adam Savage — all of whom appear in the film to back up the assertion that every one of us is vulnerable to deception (even Randi, as it turns out). Music documentaries, always a strong presence in the festival, don’t disappoint with this year’s crop. “Super Duper Alice Cooper” delves beyond the chickenslaughtering and dead-baby-eating theatrics of the man born Vincent Furnier, while showing requisite respect to the “School’s Out” singer’s outrageous (and outrage-inducing) stage antics. Using a stylistic blend of performance footage, animation and candid interviews meant to evoke the frenzied Alice Cooper per-
sona, this sprawling “Doc Opera” is from the team whose 2010 Rush documentary (“Beyond the Lighted Stage”) won the Tribeca Film Festival’s Audience Award. Multimedia artist One9 snagged the festival’s opening night honor, with “Time is Illmatic” — which follows the creative trajectory of Nas’ 1994 opus, “Illmatic.” Then a young street poet from Queensbridge, this debut album helped to define hip hop and immediately cemented his reputation as a visionary MC. Nas will perform, after the film’s April 16 screening at the Beacon Theatre. For tickets, visit tribecafilm.com/openingnight. Those of us old enough to remember the punkish pixie who fronted The Sugarcubes can appreciate the decades-long creative arc of Björk, a seriously avantgarde performer and video artist to whom the current pop vanguard owes an enormous (conscious or otherwise) debt. “Biophilia Live” blends concert footage of songs from her eighth studio album with animation as well as science and
With its April 16-27 run, the Tribeca Film Festival occupies that sweet spot where sightings of spring jackets finally trump those of the de Blasio family shoveling snow. But a trio of foreign films never got the memo. Lingering shots of Northern China’s wintry industrial landscape give atmospheric depth to director Diao Yinan’s “Black Coal, Thin Ice.” The Golden Bear winner for Best Film at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival injects social realism into its familiar cop redemption plot. Five years after being suspended from the force, the only work Zhang Zili can find is as a security guard at a coal factory. When new crimes fit the pattern of his old botched serial murder case, Zhang follows a trail leading to an enigmatic laundromat proprietor, whose possible connection to the deaths gives their dynamic a noirish edge. Opening on a classic dark and (snow) stormy night in northern Italy, “Human Capital” is director Paolo Virzi’s adaptation of Stephen Amidon’s best-selling novel — about how two loosely linked families become intertwined by conflicting perspectives on love, class and ambition. Revenge is a dish best served in the cold, and with a pitch black sense of humor — at least according to director Hans Petter Moland’s “In Order of Disappearance.” The stylish action-thriller takes place in the dead of a frozen Norwegian winter, as Nils (recent winner of his community’s “Citizen of the Year” award) comes undone after his son’s heroin overdose. Upon discovering a connection to Serbian drug dealers and a local criminal mastermind, the grieving father goes from a one-note vigilante to the centerpiece of an escalating gang war. FILM FESTIVAL, continued on p. 21
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