Alamar

1:00 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 all

 

 

Jorge and Roberta have been separated for several years. They simply come from opposite worlds: he likes an uncomplicated life in the jungle, while she prefers a more urban existence. He is Mexican and she is Italian, and she has decided to return to Rome with their five-year-old son, Natan. But before they leave, Jorge, hoping to teach young Natan about his Mayan origins, takes him to the pristine Chinchorro reef and eases him into the rhythms of a fisherman’s life. At first the boy is physically and emotionally uncomfortable with the whole affair, and gets seasick on the boat taking them to their destination. But as father and son spend more time together, Natan begins a learning experience that will remain with him forever.

Filmmaker Pedro González-Rubio crafted a beautiful, organic, visceral, and visual experience with Alamar (aka To The Sea), his first solo directorial credit. This semi-documentary, in the spirit of Robert Flaherty, makes every shot a memorable composition of elegant cinematography and perceptive observation. The New York Times’ Stephen Holden writes: “The characters in Alamar may be playing versions of themselves, but the writer, editor, and director Pedro González-Rubio has constructed a film in which the journey has an overarching mythic resonance that evokes fables from Robinson Crusoe to The Old Man and the Sea.”

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ARTIST TALK AND LIVE PERFORMANCE: MING WONG

2:00 p.m.  Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Lecture Room and White Stag Building, Portland  FREE

Artist Ming Wong will visit Eugene and Portland via live video to give an artist’s talk and live performance in conjunction with his two-city exhibition, Emotion Pictures. Wong has been recognized internationally for his ambitious performance and video works that engage with the history of world cinema. Working through the visual styles and tropes of such iconic film directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wong Kar-wai, and Ingmar Bergman, Wong’s practice considers the means through which subjectivity and geographic location are constructed by motion pictures.

At the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, from April 12 through June 2, Wong is showing Life and Death in Venice, a revisiting of Luchino Visconti’s 1971 film version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. On opposite screens the artist performs the roles of both the aging composer/writer Gustav von Aschenbach, and Tadzio, the adolescent boy whose uncorrupted youth and beauty mirrors the older man’s state of crisis and impending death. In the White Box Gallery in Portland (April 4–May 4, 2013), Wong is showing Life of Imitation, a looped 13-minute double-channel installation. Originally commissioned for the 53rd Venice Biennale Singapore Pavilion, this work is inspired by the classic Hollywood melodrama Imitation of Life, where a black mother meets her mixed-race daughter who has been running away from her true “identity.” Wong’s version features three male actors from the main ethnic groups in Singapore (Chinese, Malay, and Indian) taking turns to play the black mother and her “white” daughter.

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IMITATION of Life

4:00 p.m.  NW Film Center Whitsell Auditorium, Portland Art Museum

 

Though deemed a “soap opera” and a “women’s picture” by the critics upon its original release, Imitation of Life (1959) today is held up as a masterpiece of Douglas Sirk’s directing style.

Lana Turner plays Lora, a single white mother whose Hollywood stardom ambitions come at the expense of any meaningful relationship with her daughter, Susie (Sandra Dee). Lora’s black housekeeper, Annie (Juanita Moore), has troubles of her own as she faces the rejection of her own fair-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), who abandons her heritage for a chance to be accepted as white. As years of selfishness and denial pass, tragedy strikes and forces the women to come to terms with their own identities. Imitation of Life portrays the searing paradox and despair of racism in America, and the self-hatred it promotes. Both Kohner and Moore earned Academy Award nominations for their stirring and spectacular performances.

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Inori

4:00 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 all

 

 

Emerging Mexican documentary filmmaker Pedro Conzález-Rubio, director of the acclaimed Mexican documentary Alamar, creates another visually stunning and tranquil piece. Fans of Alamar will find gentle pleasures in yet another colorful portrayal of nature’s transcendent beauty.

Gonzalez-Rubio was inspired by the natural wonders and the inevitable melancholy faced by the aging population of a dying town in the lush, water-fed mountains of Japan’s southeastern Nara Prefecture. Through González-Rubio’s curious and empathetic outsider’s gaze, each villager becomes a fascinating character that is never alien and always extraordinary. With the forestry industry dying and younger generations abandoning the jobless countryside for the cities, this once-bustling community has largely been left to the elderly, where the few remaining residents go about their daily routines with an inescapable sense of the town’s mortality and their own.

Winner of Best Documentary at the Morelia Film Festival, Inori was cited by IndieWire’s Erick Kohn as one of the top ten undistributed films of 2012: “Pedro González-Rubio’s tender look at the handful of aging residents in a remote village hidden deep within a lush forest is one of the saddest, most poignant snapshots of mortality in recent memory.”

Canicula

11:00 a.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 all

 

 

 

In Spanish, the term “canicula” refers to the forty most torrid days of the year. For the Totonac people, this period, known as the “days of the bleeding sun,” is marked with significant rites and ceremonies. A captivating ethnographic work, Canicula is a study of the rich cultural heritage and traditions of the Totonac people of Veracruz, Mexico, who have resided in this region for thousands of years. Beautifully photographed, this documentary features rare footage of the Totonac’s “voladores” ritual (“the flying dance”), named an Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.

Observation is key in this visual journey to a small village in Zapotal, Santa Cruz, where preparations are underway for the annual rituals. Through an intimate and patient approach, director Jose Álvarez emphasizes the importance of tradition in the preservation of culture and identity. Álvarez concentrates on two areas of the community’s life: the elegant ceramics produced by a cadre of skilled women, led by Hermelinda Santes, and the religious rite of voladores, led by maestro Esteban Gonzalez. Contributing to recent trends in Mexican documentary filmmaking, Canícula follows an anthropological approach that aims to capture the tension between tradition and the creeping forces of modernity. Critically acclaimed Mexican director Alejandro González Iñarritu describes Canícula as “exciting because it is true, beautiful, and poetic.” One of the film’s cinematographers is Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio, the acclaimed documentary director whose films Alamar and Inori screen on Sunday, April 21.

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AL OTRO LADO

With guest speaker Patricia Zimmermann and director Natalia Almada (via Skype)
1:00 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 all

 

 

 

Told using Mexico’s 200-year-old tradition of corrido music, Al Otro Lado  (To the Other Side) (2005) is a documentary that tells the human story behind drug smuggling and illegal immigration from Sinaloa, Mexico, to the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Magdiel, a 23-year-old fisherman and aspiring composer, dreams of a better life in the United States (“the other side”). Coming from the drug capital of Mexico, he faces two choices to improve his life: to traffic drugs or to illegally cross the border into the United States, where even menial jobs can support families and communities left behind. His experiences are rendered through the corrido, troubadour-like ballads through which migrants create their own form of cultural belonging.

Al Otro Lado is director, producer, and filmmaker Natalia Almada’s documentary debut, which aired as part of PBS‘s POV series in 2006. It received the Special Jury Prize and the Best Editing Award at the Cine Ceará Film Festival. “My family has lived in Sinaloa for six generations, but it was my generation that saw how free trade with our wealthy neighbor changed our economy and culture,” says Almada. “For over 200 years corrido songs have been the musical underground newspapers, and today tell of drug traffickers and illegal immigrants—people who have beaten the system and provided jobs and much-needed infrastructure to rural communities in a struggling economy.” Jon Pareles writes in The New York Times: “The documentary is handsomely filmed, whether in sun-drenched landscapes or crowded nightclubs. It is not a history of corridos, which have roots that reach back to medieval songs; it is a glimpse of art running parallel to daily life.”

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DIM SUM WARRIORS

With Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo
1:00 p.m.  Eugene Public Library (100 W. 10th Ave.), Bascom-Tykesom Room   FREE

Filmmakers and comic book creators Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh (who are also, respectively, an education professor and lawyer) will discuss, project, and perform stories from their comic book iPad app, Dim Sum Warriors.

Dim Sum Warriors is an all-ages, crazy martial arts adventure comedy about kung fu fighting Chinese snacks. Growing up in Singapore, Woo and Goh’s families had two weekend rituals in common: going for a dim sum brunch, and then watching kung fu movies. Kung fu fighting dumplings were thus their inevitable creative offspring.

They also wanted to give their daughter a sense of both her ethnic Chinese as well as her American heritage, so Yen Yen used her education background to design the comic as an interactive app that could also support learning English and Chinese. In the app, you can do cool things like tap word balloons to change the text from English to Chinese and back, or summon translations complete with hanyu pinyin pronunciation guides, as well as activate audio performances of the dialogue.

Rob Salkowitz, author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture, writes: “it’s hilarious. . . The creativity and ingenuity of Dim Sum Warriors is matched only by its market potential. It not only has the usual entertainment reach of a kid-oriented manga title, it has built-in value for parents and educators around the world, particularly overseas Chinese in English-speaking countries who want their kids to benefit from mastering the world’s two most widely-spoken languages.”

Cosponsored with CABA, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Asian Studies,  and Comics Studies Program.

 

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SINGAPORE DREAMING

With guest directors Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo
4:00 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 all

 

 

 

Heavily in debt, patriarch Loh Poh Huat can’t help but feel bitter irony whenever he has to perform his job as a lawyer’s clerk. At the end of his career and frustrated by the gulf between his middle class dreams and his working class reality, he takes his feelings of failure and envy out on his family. So when Poh Huat suddenly wins two million dollars in the lottery, the Lohs start believing that maybe this windfall will deliver them from their struggles.

In 2006, Yen Yen Woo and Colin Goh wrote, directed, and produced this, their second feature, which played at numerous film festivals worldwide and also won some prestigious awards: the Montblanc Screenwriters Award at the 54th San Sebastian International Film Festival; the Best Asian/Middle Eastern Film Award at the 20th Tokyo International Film Festival; and the Audience Award for Narrative Feature at the 30th Asian-American International Film Festival.

Variety praised it as “a graceful satire on Western capitalism in the East,” while the San Francisco Film Society described Singapore Dreaming as a “delightful story of family ties, status anxiety, and a rapidly changing metropolis. Boasting an ensemble cast of the highest order, this comedy of errors recalls the early films of Ang Lee and the work of Taiwanese director Edward Yang.”

Cosponsored with CAPS, Asian Studies, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Asian Studies.

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Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse

With guest filmmaker Brian Lindstrom
6:30 p.m. and 9:15 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

 

 

On September 17, 2006, James Chasse was stopped by three police officers in Portland, Oregon, before a dozen eyewitnesses who watched in horror as the officers tackled, beat, kicked, and tased James until he lay motionless on the pavement. He was not suspected of a crime, nor had he committed one. He died in the custody of the Portland police about two hours later.

Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse takes a deep look at Chasse’s life, uncovering his suburban childhood, involvement in Portland’s early punk music scene, the teenage onset of his schizophrenia, the peeling away of friendships and opportunities as his illness progressed into his adulthood, and his ability to carve out an independent existence despite his mental illness. The film examines how society treats mental illness and questions the practices of institutionalization. Using interviews, personal writings, archival footage, official documents, and depositions, the film explores James Chasse’s life and the actions and decisions that led to his death. What emerges is an intimate and complex story of one man’s life, the struggle for his family to find justice after his tragic death, and a city and a system grappling with accountability.

Made as a Kickstarter passion project, Alien Boy took over six years to create with support from over 1,500 people. As a project of the Mental Health Association of Portland, all revenue generated by the film goes to support the nonprofit advocacy organization. AP Kryza of Willamette Week was among the many critics who raved about the film after its recent Portland International Film Festival premiere: “Infuriating, tragic, heartbreaking, and incendiary in equal measures, Portland filmmaker Brian Lindstrom’s Alien Boy: The Life and Death of James Chasse is a documentary that plays out like a horror film and leaves you absolutely breathless.”

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ADRENALINE FILM PROJECT Screening and Afterparty!

Hosted by Leigh Kilton-Smith, Omar Naim, and Rom Alejandro
9:30 p.m.   PLC 180 on the University of Oregon campus   1415 Kincaid Street
Tickets: $7 stu/srs; $10 general

Come see the results of Eugene’s fourth Adrenaline Film Project. On Wednesday, April 17, several teams of filmmakers will be assigned a genre and given a line of dialogue and prop to be incorporated into their productions. For the next seventy-two hours, they will pitch, write, shoot, and edit their films, turning them in at 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, April 20. The mentors who guide them through the seventy-two-hour process (Rom Alejandro, Omar Naim, and Leigh Kilton-Smith) will host the films’ premieres, and the assembled crowd will vote for an Audience Award. A jury of film professionals will also give one film its top prize, the Kalb Award, and the mentors will select a third prize winner.  Following the screening, your ticket will get you into the celebratory Adrenaline Afterparty, featuring music and refreshments in the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art!

OPEN SPACE DOCUMENTARY

A presentation by Patricia Zimmermann and Helen De Michiel
12:00 p.m.  Lawrence Hall 249  Free

While we love their gutsy vigor, long-form documentaries loom a bit like skyscrapers from the 1960s—overbuilt and probably not sustainable. In comparison, more agile “open space” transmedia projects are taking advantage of digital platforms to become more responsive and flexible and less predictable. Emerging models for participatory documentary are evolving new pathways for distribution and conversation. Using newly available tools and apps, filmmakers are testing how media can communicate stories, imagine social change, and function as a dynamically evolving interactive “open space.” Instead of being defined by national or international borders, the open space documentary model frames local and community-based media practices as key to bringing together people with diverse interests.

The speakers will demonstrate and discuss examples of media organizations and projects that exemplify the spirit of open space documentary and seek to influence social change. One key example will be EngageMedia (www.engagemedia.org). Based in Indonesia and Australia, EngageMedia is a new media portal dedicated to publishing and curating independently made media looking at environmental and social justice issues in the Asia Pacific region. Since a vibrant transmedia culture is also emerging in the US,  Zimmermann and De Michiel will present an array of examples from around the country that illuminate the human dimensions of urban development, transnational agriculture, and the growing food movement.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. She is also codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, a major international festival housed at Ithaca College.

Helen De Michiel is a director, writer, and producer whose work includes film, television, and video installations. Her 1995 feature film Tarantella, starring Mira Sorvino, was shown at the Seattle Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the 1996 Torino International Woman’s Film Festival. Her open space documentary Lunch Love Community is a pioneering transmedia work.

Cosponsored with the New Media and Culture Program and the Arts and Administration Program.

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Jeremiah Lecture

SINGLISH: AN AUTHENTIC OR BROKEN VOICE?

An illustrated lecture by Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo
3:30 p.m.  Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Lecture Room  Free

In under four decades, the tiny city-state of Singapore has progressed beyond the “third world” to become one of the world’s richest nations. Among the policies given credit for its economic success are language campaigns that, in an effort to connect Singaporeans linguistically with other populations (especially those of powerful nations), urge them to speak Mandarin Chinese instead of other Chinese dialects, and to speak “Good English” instead of Singaporean English, or “Singlish.” These policies have also led to censorship of ungrammatical English and the curbing of Chinese dialects in the mainstream media; arguably as a result of such censorship, vital local sources of creativity and authenticity have been constrained in Singapore. Drawing from their personal experiences, Singaporean filmmakers Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo discuss how Singapore’s language policies affect freedom of expression, the creative process, film distribution, and how things are changing. They will illustrate their presentation with clips from their feature film, TalkingCock: The Movie. This film grew out of a satirical website, TalkingCock.com, launched in 2000, that was designed in part to counter the proscriptions and denigrations of Singlish by Singapore’s political leaders.

Colin Goh and  Yen Yen Woo are a husband-and-wife team with a remarkably eclectic slate of productions. They have released two feature films, including Singapore Dreaming (screening in this festival) and the new graphic novel and interactive bilingual iPad app Dim Sum Warriors. Colin, a former practicing attorney, also writes and draws cartoons for numerous publications. Yen Yen, a former high school teacher in Singapore, went on to become a research rellow and lecturer at Columbia University’s prestigious Teachers College, where she earned her doctorate. She is now an associate professor at Long Island University’s College of Education and Information Sciences. Together with their daughter, they divide their time between Singapore and New York.

Cosponsored with Center for Asian and Pacific Studies Jeremiah Lecture Series, East Asian Languages and Literatures, Asian Studies Program, and the Linguistics Department.

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Best of the Northwest Filmmakers Festival

Buoy and 3 Short Films

With director Steve Doughton
6:30 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

 

 

Portland filmmaker Steven Doughton brings us his first feature film, Buoy (2012), a minimalist drama that traces the revival of a precious familial relationship through a single eighty-minute phone call.  Buoy took home the narrative feature award at the 39th Annual Northwest Filmmaker’s Festival in 2012. Marc Mohan from The Oregonian describes Buoy as “A bold but never showy bit of innovative filmmaking.”

Tina Holmes beautifully performs the role of T.C., a suburban mother of two who receives an unexpected phone call from her estranged brother Danny, voiced by Matthew Del Negro. After a two-year communication lapse, the two siblings embark on an emotional journey in which an examination of the past, the present, and the future re-establishes a sense of closeness that had previously disintegrated between them. As T.C. goes about her daily household chores, her telephone conversation is heavy with personal confessions, controversial advice, childhood recollections, and critical judgment.  Doughton creates a surprisingly engaging and cinematic experience with the most minimal of means—two characters and one location. The sharp dialogue and terrific acting performances of the two leads (one represented only by voice) bring out the love, depth, and complexity of T.C. and Danny’s challenging relationship.

Shown with:

Dear Peter, Woodchips and Dear Peter, Woodchips II (Orlando Nutt, Portland, 6 min.)
Orland’s open letter to Peter concerns a steaming pile of woodchips, Mt. Fuji, and context.

Later than Usual (David Hovan, Vancouver, 6 min.)
An elderly couple marks time toward a not-so-inevitable end.

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ON screenwriting and directing

A talk by Guillermo Arriaga
7:00 p.m.  Oak Hill School  FREE

Guillermo Arriaga is a Mexican screenwriter, author, director, and producer. He is also an eloquent speaker and teacher, and he will speak tonight about his evolution as a writer and director. He will also share insights into his approach to screenwriting and the techniques that he has taught in his legendary master classes.

Before becoming a screenwriter, the Mexico City native had already made a name for himself as a novelist and professor, but it was his trilogy of film collaborations with director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu that earned Arriaga a world of new audiences. Amores Perros (2000), a gritty tale of parents, children, and intertwined lives on the rough streets of Mexico City, gained international recognition and is still considered one of the most praised films of Mexican cinema. Arriaga’s fresh, invigorating style of piecing together emotionally gripping stories as intricate, interlocking human puzzles still persists. He continued to write award winning, critically acclaimed screenplays such as 21 Grams (2003), The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), the Oscar-nominated Babel (2006), and The Burning Plain (2009), his directorial debut. His literary roots, boldly complex structures, and examinations of things people fear the most helped raise the bar of what a Hollywood film with A-list actors could accomplish, as well as what producers believed an audience could handle.

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JEREMY ROURKE: LIVE MUSIC AND ANIMATION

9:15 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

Jeremy Rourke is a self-taught animator and musician living in San Francisco. Using paper, paint, shadows, wood, old photographs, new photographs, flowers, tape, pens, pencils, leaves, and sticks to make his animations, his works (which are set to his own music) have been shown at film festivals around the country. During live performances, Rourke tries “really extra hard to magically enter the movie screen.” In 2011, he was named “best new animator/musician” by SF Weekly, which elaborated: “Jeremy Rourke is the kind of artist we love. He follows what inspires him, which in this case is stop-motion animation and music, teaching himself what he needs to get there and along the way producing great work that inspires others. One of his movies, Out to See, places cutouts of assorted figures (a man in an overcoat, a ship, a truck, owls, old-timey bicyclists, fish) in modern-day San Francisco. The song is a mixture of up-tempo and melancholy; Rourke reflects this dichotomy in his images by placing emotive characters into ever-changing scenery that is always surprising, yet (despite its fast pace) never feels hurried. Did we mention he writes and performs the music too?”

 

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FRINGE FESTIVAL FIESTA

9:30 p.m.–12:30 a.m.  Location Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Cafe

Tickets: $5 stu; $8 general

Come to the Schnitzer Museum Cafe and prepare to have your mind and senses blown by interactive digital piñatas and video remixes of classic Mexican cinema, the return of the prize-winning Inflato-Globe, salsa music mixed by DJ Mario Mora, and delectable food from Daniel’s Mexican Restaurant. This party is going to be awesome and you don’t want to miss it. Admission includes two free drinks. Cosponsored with UO MeCHA.

 

THE HOME MOVIE ARCHIVE LIVE

A talk by Patricia Zimmerman
12:00 p.m.   Knight Library Proctor 41     FREE

Home movies are often positioned as dead, inert, ghostly, decayed. Scholars of home movies position them as evidentiary and referential. This talk proposes an opposite, almost counterintuitive move towards “live;” it ponders how the home movie archive “live” can function proactively to generate new spaces through performance and the performativity of remix.

Once home movies are recovered and deposited in archives, a default position emerges: their acquisition is all that matters. The thing itself—the celluloid reels, metal cans, deteriorating color—become more and more fetishized as fixed representations. Instead, the home movie artifact can be repositioned as open and active, no longer a mortuary of nostalgic historic images shrouded in longing, desire, and quaintness. Archival remix projects with live music, installations requiring walking, shows in clubs with multiple projections on walls, and guided bus tours with home movies on monitors chart the shape-shifting landscapes of the home movie archive live. The archive is re-imagined not as a product but as a process, not as a place but as an encounter, not as a representation but as a collaborative, dynamic space.

Patricia R. Zimmermann is professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College and is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Indiana, 1995), States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (Minnesota, 2000), and coeditor of Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories (California, 2008).

 

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RUINS IN RECENT INDEPENDENT CHINESE CINEMA

An illustrated lecture by Berenice Reynaud
2:00 p.m.   Global Scholars Hall 123   FREE

The emergence of the New Chinese Cinema has been one of the most exciting events in the last decade, as it is exploring new ways to represent a society in which billions of inhabitants are submitted to radical and unexpected changes. A new generation of filmmakers (including Wang Bing, Jia Zhangke, Ou Ning, Cao Fei, Ying Liang, Cui Zi’en) are creatively using digital media to coin hybrid forms between documentary and fiction. This presentation will discuss how this new cinema is addressing an overwhelming phenomenon currently taking place in China, the production of ruins as part of planned urban renewal. The spectacle of such ruins is caused by a variety of historical and sociological factors, including the general shift from heavy industry to service industry, the construction of the Three-Gorges Dam, and the preparation for the Olympics in Beijing and World Fair in Shanghai.

Significantly, a number of new Chinese films articulate how the ruins address the spectator, directly or indirectly, and reshuffle tropes of historical/architectural memory and nostalgia. Excerpts from films by Jia Zhangke, Ou Ning, Ying Liang, Wang Bing, and others will be shown.

Bérénice Reynaud is the author of Nouvelles Chines, nouveaux cinémas (Paris, 1999) and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s A City of Sadness (London, 2002).  She has written extensively on Chinese cinema and video, US independent/experimental cinema, queer cinema and cinema by women for Sight & Sound (UK), Film Comment (USA), Cinema Scope (Canada), Senses of Cinema (Australia), Cahiers du cinéma, Le Monde diplomatique, Libération (France), Meteor, Springerin (Austria), and Nosferatu (Spain), among others.  A Delegate for the San Sebastian International Film Festival (Spain) since 1993, she has also curated film/video series for the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume (Paris), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the UCLA Film & Television Archive (Los Angeles), and is Co-Curator for the film series at the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (Los Angeles). Reynaud teaches at the California Institute of the Arts.

 

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The Bartolome de las Casas Lecture in Latin American Studies

THE U.S.-MEXICAN BORDER THROUGH THE LENS OF A WRITER

A lecture by Guillermo Arriaga
4:00 p.m.   JSMA Lecture Room  FREE

Writer and director Guillermo Arriaga discusses the influence of border issues on his work. Arriaga is renowned for his fragmentary, nonlinear narratives that connect characters across national borders, most notably in the “death trilogy” he wrote and Alfonso Inarritu directed: Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel. Arriaga’s The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, directed by Tommy Lee Jones, deals directly with the tensions on the U.S.-Mexican border, a terrain that Arriaga has known well since his childhood. He believes that the border between Mexico and the United States is filled with stories of love and friendship, of violence and cruelty, of hope and desire, and of redemption and criminality. The humanity of these stories can be lost when analysis is done from afar and in the aggregate, rather than from the empathetic position of the storyteller.

 

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ANT FARM: THEN AND NOW

A lecture by Chip Lord
6:00 p.m.   UO Willamette Hall 100  FREE

The group Ant Farm created a radical architectural practice during the decade 1968- 1978.  This lecture by Ant Farm’s co-founder Chip Lord revisits a number of those seminal works as well as presenting recent projects.  Ant Farm Media Van v.08 [Time Capsule] stands as a project that both looks back to the 1970’s as a video archive and forward to the future via a digital time capsule for the year 2030.  House of the Century, Cadillac Ranch, Media Burn, and Ant Farm’s legendary “inflatables” will be presented along with Convention City, 1976.

 

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THE LOVE SONGS OF TIEDAN

With guest speaker Berenice Reynaud
6:30 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

 

 

A larkish tribute to the er ren tai form of bawdy folk singing practiced for centuries in director Jie Hao’s home in the northwestern mountainous region of China, The Love Songs of Tiedan (Mei Jie) is shot in a dirt-poor village in this region and acted mostly by native nonprofessionals.

The temporary prohibition of er ren tai is just one obstacle that our hero Tiedan (Feng Si) must cope with. As a child, the precocious Tiedan becomes deeply attached to er ren tai-singing neighbor Sister May. As an adult he ends up having various romantic complications with all three of her children—identified only as First Daughter, Second Daughter, and Third Daughter. Sister May is the pupil and the singing partner of Tiedan’s father, a man so devoted to er ren tai that he will get into serious trouble during the Cultural Revolution for practicing a “feudal” form of entertainment. Sister May has a boorish husband who begets her three daughters, claims her as she is hiding in Tiedan’s parents house, and eventually takes her on the other side of the mountain to the Mongolian border.

Director Jie Hao focuses on male desire as in his debut, Single Man, a film that earned him an international reputation as one of China’s most exciting new independent directors. But The Love Songs of Tiedan, according to visiting critic Berenice Reynaud, draws from a broader “range of cinematic and visual styles from ethnomusicology to musical to comedy to expressionism.” Hao also pushes the envelope of romantic longing and erotic obsession much further than in his previous work.

 

 

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THE BURNING PLAIN

With Guillermo Arriaga
9:15 p.m.  Bijou Art Cinemas
Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

 

 

 

Critically acclaimed Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros, 21 Grams) made his directorial debut with The Burning Plain (2009), set and largely filmed in Portland, Oregon. At the Venice Film Festival where it premiered, the film received a standing ovation and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for, in her first featured role, an eighteen-year-old actress named Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence’s audition tape blew away the film’s executive producer and star, Charlize Theron, when Arriaga brought it to her.

Three years after the film’s release in the U.S., where it fared less well commercially than it did in Europe, Arriaga returns to Oregon for a series of screenings hosted by the University of Oregon’s Cinema Pacific Film Festival. Maybe Arriaga’s eloquent presence, or the chance to see Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence pre-Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, will encourage you to take a second look at this strong and neglected work.

As usual with Arriaga, the film is an ensemble drama following several characters in different times and places. Here, the characters are an Oregon woman trying to reconcile with her mother after a traumatic childhood; two teenagers trying to save their parents in a New Mexico border town; a young girl on a journey of redemption; and a couple dealing with their extramarital affair. Sylvia (Charlize Theron), Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), and Gina (Kim Basinger) are the central female characters who suffer from damaged pasts.

With filming locations mostly in Oregon and New Mexico, the film is beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood). Arriaga’s intricate writing weaves together the intercut storylines in a continuously dramatic fashion. The Burning Plain’s fragmented approach to storytelling may require viewers to put the pieces together themselves, but this work is amply rewarded.

AMARILLO

Screening and panel discussion with Ruth Wikler-Luker, Lynn Stephen, and director Jorge Vargas (via Skype)

4:00 p.m. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Lecture Room FREE

 

 

 

A man departs for the US-Mexican border and vanishes before reaching his destination: Amarillo, Texas. Through stunning projected images, bilingual monologues and a sea of displaced objects and natural elements, director Jorge Vargas and his collaborators in Teatro Línea de Sombra reconstruct this journey in a multimedia performance that travels imagined landscapes of geography and cultural identity. The absent man takes on multiple faces and names as he comes to symbolize the thousands of disillusioned travelers who have suffered a similar fate. Using the conventions of contemporary performance to give voice to the plight of individuals, Amarillo touches on the complex nature of individual and national identity in a time of exodus, both for those who leave and those who are left behind. The film of Amarillo’s theatrical performance, prepared by Seattle’s On the Boards contemporary arts company, retains the immersive and sensual atmosphere of the live performance.

Founded in 1993 by Jorge A. Vargas, Teatro Línea de Sombra is one of the most celebrated Mexican theater ensembles and has received international acclaim. Their roots in political theater and ensemble collaborations result in performances with visceral imagery, evocative soundscapes, and rich storytelling. Twice awarded Best Research Theatre in Mexico (2000 and 2005), they have toured numerous countries in the Americas and Europe, and are permanently touring their home country.

Ruth Wikler-Luker of Boom Arts will moderate the post-film discussion with Lynn Stephen (UO Department of Anthropology) and Jorge Vargas, director of Amarillo, who will join via Skype.

Co-presented with Boom Arts and OntheBoards.tv.

 

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THE VIDEO ART OF CHIP LORD

With visiting artist Chip Lord

7:00 p.m. Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art Lecture Room FREE
As a member of Ant Farm (1968-1978), Chip Lord produced the video art classics Media Burn and The Eternal Frame as well as the Cadillac Ranch sculpture in Amarillo, Texas. Since 1980, he has worked independently and in collaboration, producing video installations and single-channel videotapes. Lord presents and discusses his work, which straddles documentary and experimental genres, often mixing the two.

 

Awakening from the 20th Century (1999, 35 min.)

This video essay contends with the collision between the actual and the virtual in the city of San Francisco. “Is life becoming virtual?” Lord asks. “Are we witnessing the end of the City?” These questions are taken up by six prominent writers, musicians, and multi-media workers, who describe their own shifting relationships to technology and public space within the city.

Une Ville de l’Avenir (2011, 12 min.)

The modernism of La Defense provides the setting for a revisiting of Godard’s Alphaville and our dreams and nightmares of the City of the Future.

In Transit (2011, 22 min.)

An observed video portrait of the spaces of air travel, In Transit moves from San Francisco to Shanghai, Beijing to London, and from Frankfurt to Mexico City to Los Angeles.

 

Schnitzer Museum visitors are invited to see the artifacts of Ant Farm that are on display in the West of Center exhibition. Lord will speak about Ant Farm briefly Wednesday, April 17 and more extensively on Thursday, April 18 in Lawrence Hall at 6:00 p.m.

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THE THREE BURIALS OF MELQUIADES ESTRADA

With screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga

7:00 p.m. Bijou Art Cinemas

Tickets: $6 sr/stu; $8 general

 

 

 

Special Pre-Festival Portland Event!

THE BURNING PLAIN

With Guillermo Arriaga
7:30 p.m.  Northwest Film Center, Portland

 

 

 

Critically acclaimed Mexican screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, Amores Perros, 21 Grams) made his directorial debut with The Burning Plain (2009), set and largely filmed in Portland, Oregon. At the Venice Film Festival where it premiered, the film received a standing ovation and the Marcello Mastroianni Award for, in her first featured role, an eighteen-year-old actress named Jennifer Lawrence. Lawrence’s audition tape blew away the film’s executive producer and star, Charlize Theron, when Arriaga brought it to her.

Three years after the film’s release in the U.S., where it fared less well commercially than it did in Europe, Arriaga returns to Oregon for a series of screenings hosted by the University of Oregon’s Cinema Pacific Film Festival. Maybe Arriaga’s eloquent presence, or the chance to see Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence pre-Hunger Games and Silver Linings Playbook, will encourage you to take a second look at this strong and neglected work.

As usual with Arriaga, the film is an ensemble drama following several characters in different times and places. Here, the characters are an Oregon woman trying to reconcile with her mother after a traumatic childhood; two teenagers trying to save their parents in a New Mexico border town; a young girl on a journey of redemption; and a couple dealing with their extramarital affair. Sylvia (Charlize Theron), Mariana (Jennifer Lawrence), and Gina (Kim Basinger) are the central female characters who suffer from damaged pasts.

With filming locations mostly in Oregon and New Mexico, the film is beautifully shot by the great cinematographer Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood). Arriaga’s intricate writing weaves together the intercut storylines in a continuously dramatic fashion. The Burning Plain’s fragmented approach to storytelling may require viewers to put the pieces together themselves, but this work is amply rewarded.