YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—KANO: AN AMERICAN AND HIS HAREM

As Monster Jimenez explains on the website for her documentary Kano: An American and His Harem, "kano" (pronounced kä•nô') is Tagalog slang for Amerikano; i.e., American. But, Jimenez qualifies that Filipinos usually refer to any caucasian, regardless of ethnicity, as kano. The kano in question is Victor Pearson, a decorated American Marine who arrived in the Philippines in 1969 after surviving a bomb blast while fighting in Vietnam, thereby earning himself a hefty disability pension of $3,500 a month for his post-traumatic stress disorder. Considering that at the time the average monthly income for a Filipino was a mere $250, Pearson arrived a wealthy man by comparison, and was able to wield considerable influence and power. He set his sights on "living the dream"; one that "every heterosexual male dreams about."

Pearson swiftly discovered how easy it was for him to secure a Filipino wife and a plot of land in a poor, remote village in the Philippine province of Negros Occidental. He built a compound and filled it with a harem of wives and mistresses, many of them underage women as young as 11, all dependent upon his financial handouts. "It was like Christmas and birthday and holiday all rolled into one", he recalls proudly. With his disability fund, Pearson lived like a king in his compound for more than two decades, where the main activity was sex. In exchange for "love", Pearson offered his women allowances, jewelry, and shopping money.

But in 2001, Pearson was charged with 87 counts of rape against eight women, most of them reported to be aged 13 to 16 at the time, convicted on two counts the following year, and sentenced to 80 years in jail. Irregardless, the Sideways Films one-sheet for the film wryly asserts, "We think you'll like him." And there's no denying that Pearson has plenty of charisma—and rationalizations—to spare.

At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Oggs Cruz characterizes: "Pearson looks like a thoroughly unkempt Harvey Keitel and talks like a reflective but drunken Edward G. Robinson. He is an inevitable screen personality. His back story, with the possible barrage of psychological torture from a hinted torturous childhood and Vietnam War experiences, could have been a Kubrick thriller. His present story, as embattled villain in a legal battle against all odds, could have been a clever Lumet court drama."

At Piling Piling Pelikula, Dodo Dayao offers his take: "If it doesn't exactly plumb the same depths of malevolence as, say, Charles Manson, what he does exude is a similarly dangerous ambivalence: charismatic and diabolical in equal measure. And it leaks into the movie, irradiating it almost. The part where he sings 'Love Potion #9' smacks of both the quaint and the sinister, and not merely out of how creepy the subtext of the song gets, no. One second he's your boisterous uncle with one too many drinks in him hogging the family videoke, the next he's Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet. He is, in many ways, the quintessential pervert. He is also the perfect documentary subject."

At Spot, Ria Limjap describes Pearson as a fascinating character who Jimenez allows "to unfold with a gentle detachment. She catches Pearson's twisted charisma and his central tragedy, evoking revulsion and compassion in equal measure. The nicotine-stained and puffy-eyed sexual predator should be nothing but repulsive, right? Right. But sometimes he's just a lonely old man with screaming lambs of his own."

Although Pearson is now serving two life sentences in Manila, many of his women stand by him, surprisingly even those who testified against him in court. Pearson and his harem form an extended family bound together by codependency and power issues. Although still behind bars, he has since married five of the women who testified against him in court, keeping them in apartments in the neighborhood. Several of the women sport tattoos bearing his name. With considerable prurience, Jimenez explores the blurred line between generosity and exploitation. Whereas on one hand women sold their own children to Pearson, on the other hand he financed their education and provided opportunity they could otherwise never hope to have.

Unrepentant when confronted with his abuse of girls as young as 14, Pearson claims that the lifestyle and education he provided these women outweighs the charges leveled at him. This becomes the provocative litmus test of Kano—the filmmakers don't judge, both sides are presented as fairly as possible, and it's up to each audience member to determine "right" from "wrong" in this tangled and conflicted scenario. As Basil Tsiokos states it for Indiewire: "Giving equal time to both Pearson and the women's stories, the film gradually reveals a system of sexual subservience predicated on economic exploitation—a system that most women (or their families) may have entered resignedly, but, sadly, fully aware." But Oggs Cruz warns against too simplistic a reduction: "To simply regard their intertwined relationships as primarily economic is to disregard the complexity of human nature. Jimenez explores not only the cycle of financial dependency but also the continuously evolving emotions, no matter how misplaced, mutated and immoral they seem to be."

Dodo Dayao furthers: "At no point does the film slavishly demonize Pearson. At no point does it need to either. That's the bone to pick for many. Only its gut-punch, both as film and as argument, really gets its brunt from resisting the urge to editorialize, leveling everything past the point of being about one man's guilt to being more about an entire nation's cultural psyche. How deep our resident subservience to the white man runs. How every moral choice tends to boil down to money changing hands. How money is our enabler, our prosthetic, our elixir, our atonement. And more than that, how the beloved infidel may well be our prevailing icon of machismo. Pearson doesn't faze us too much, perhaps, because he is, in many ways, nothing new. He is every domestic action star who ever played a real-life philandering family man slash cop hero and spread the gospel of the other woman as a badge of manliness. And that he's a war hero, too, makes the embodiment even more perverse."

Funded by the National Commission for Culture and the Arts (Philippines), the Asian Network of Documentary (South Korea) and the Goteborg Film Fund (Sweden), Kano is the first documentary project of Arkeofilms, the independent film production company where Jimenez is managing director. It was selected for the First Appearance Competition of the 23rd edition of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA), November 17–28, 2010, where it won. As reported by Isabel L. Templo to the Philippine Daily Inquirer, "The five-man international jury called it a film of 'disturbing power [that] explores a stunning mix of child abuse, post-traumatic stress syndrome, polygamy, co-dependence, sex addiction, criminality, and the lone voice of one woman whose testimony sends a troubled Amerikano living in the Philippines to jail.' " It likewise won Best Documentary at both the 2010 edition of Cinemalaya and the 2011 edition of the Gawad Urian Awards.

Though Victor Pearson is, as Dodo Dayao stated above, "the perfect documentary subject" and his story an undeniably compelling one, the documentary itself is more informative than artful and marred by indecisive camera work that struggles to position itself within the scenes, aggravated by quick zooms in and out that feel unsettling and amateurish.

Kano: An American and His Harem will have its U.S. premiere at YBCA on Friday, June 8, 2012, 1:00PM. Ticket info here.

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Dodo Dayao, Filipino Cinema, Monster Jimenez, Oggs Cruz, Victor Pearson, YBCA,

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CANNES 2012: POST TENEBRAS LUX and COSMOPOLIS—By Ryan Lattanzio

Like a Freudian dream where logic is nil and cryptic symbols await us on every sinuous narrative turn, Post Tenebras Lux [IMDb] is Carlos Reygadas' most personal film to date. Themes of banal family life, boyhood, soured innocence, sin and self-sacrifice color this visually sublime cinematic experiment, all shot in the Academy ratio (a la Andrea Arnold). I mean "sublime" in the Romantic-era sense of the expression, as the film—with its dreary, waterlogged landscape sequences, its fuzzy POV shots and high levels of aesthetic artifice—captures nature's ability to exhilarate us, and to terrify us.

The film resembles a kind of arthouse home movie, illuminating private family moments, from waking up in the morning to having dinner together at the table, through an autobiographical lens. Reygadas is known for his slow, dreamy films Silent Light (2007), Japón (2002) and Battle in Heaven (2005), and Post Tenebras Lux (Latin for "after darkness light") plays like a survey of all the Mexican director's works and fetishes.

It opens with a little girl discovering the world. Running through wet plains, she points to and names cows, horses, dogs and trees. This goes on for about five minutes until a thunderstorm bellows from above, and Reygadas moves us into a domestic interior. As his parents sleep, a little boy (presumably the girl's brother) is greeted by a cartoonish, anatomically correct, CGI-rendered devil, composed of a glowing red light. Carrying a briefcase, the devil enters, stands in the child's room and stares at him. The sheer surreality of this moment brings to mind Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (2010)—populated by talking red-eyed monkeys, ghosts and doppelgangers—snagged the Palme d'Or when Tim Burton was head of the jury.

But Reygadas is totally his own man, despite references to Tolstoy, philosophy and even his own childhood. Sonorous sound design, amplifying the rustle of leaves and mud and trickles of rain, paired with breathless visual style, make for a purely cinematic, expressionist experience.

Post Tenebras Lux has been derided by nearly every critic imaginable for its impossibly difficult (non)structure, its lack of linearity and its disjointed narrative that moves discursively from episode to episode. Reygadas will become fascinated with one thing (a criminal subplot, for example, that seems to be one of the film's turning points) and then will simply move onto another, abandoning that plot entirely.

If there's some bleary sense of a narrative here, it's the story of Juan (Adolfo Jiménez Castro), a sex-starved patriarch who tries to do the very best for his family but ultimately lets his aggressions get the better of him. In one of the first scenes where we meet Juan, he beats one of his dogs to death, making it difficult to sympathize with this guy. His wife Natalia (Nathalia Acevedo) is a beautiful, younger woman who lives with her husband and their two children (who we meet in the opening scenes) in an affluent home in some vacuum of space and time in the countryside of Mexico.

Like 2011 Palme d'Or winner The Tree of Life, to which Reygadas is (however unconsciously) indebted, Post Tenebras Lux shifts back and forth in time, undulating and expanding to create new wholes while gobbling others. We see Juan and Natalia's children grown-up, looking pensive on a beach or running around a family party where pseudo-intellectuals discuss Russian authors. We see, unrelatedly, a team of English boys playing rugby (this is the film's most impenetrable scene).

In a moment as kinky and strange as anything this side of Buñuel, Juan and Natalia take a vacation to some indiscriminate European bathhouse. Traveling from room to room in this steamy hothouse, Juan and Natalia look for rooms called "Duchamp" and "Hegel" before Natalia has sex with a stranger while her husband watches. All the while, as Natalia's body is penetrated, a naked woman cossets Natalia, holding her head like a mother and sweetly telling her, "Your body was made for this." This disturbing and (unintentionally?) hilarious scene is one of the film's most bizarre, but we can see Reygadas's mastery of mise-en-scène at play. The bathhouse, tinged with pinkish hues, swampy and steamy and filled with grotesque naked bodies, displays his ability to carve imaginative interior spaces as well as exteriors.

I'm always a sucker for experimental, non-narrative cinema. There were a few moments where I dozed off and would wake up, completely lost, wondering, "Where the hell are we?" But I soon realized this was exactly what Reygadas aimed to achieve: a defamiliarizing cinema of a phenomenal world where anything can happen. Even if Post Tenebras Lux is a bit trapped inside its designer's head, the film has burrowed its way into mine.

* * *

This year at Cannes has been a great one for auteurs. I've been graced with works by Reygadas, Haneke, Kiarostami, Vinterberg, Audiard, Anderson and, finally, David Cronenberg. Bristling with energy, cold unfeeling and ideas, Cosmopolis [official site] is the Canadian director's best film since A History of Violence (2005), which also premiered at Cannes.

Adapted from Don DeLillo's 2003 novel of the same name, Cosmopolis is a heady plunge into a dystopian urban milieu of greed, corruption, technology, celebrity and nihilism. Robert Pattinson—who I had never actually seen in a film until now (yeah, I know)—channels Travis Bickle (Taxi Driver, 1976) in his performance as Eric Packer, a dissolute 28-year-old billionaire who needs a haircut. The film tracks Packer's descent into mania as he rides in the back of a stretch limo trying to get across town in Manhattan the same day the president has arrived. Inside the soundproof limo, all is quiet. On the outside, the world roars with chaos and anarchy. Protesters tout the words of Karl Marx ("a specter is haunting the world") and everyone seems to be out to get Eric.

Eric holds an indiscriminate position of power as someone who deals in money, betting on the rise and fall of international currencies while living a life of debauchery and lawlessness. He drinks exorbitant amounts of liquor, has casual sex ad infinitum and discards people like spittle. Inside the limo, he is greeted by an idiosyncratic cast of characters played by Jay Baruchel (the skinny, stuttering dweeb from Freaks and Geeks and other Judd Apatow worlds), Juliette Binoche, Samantha Morton and even, in a gleefully mad little cameo, Mathieu Amalric. In one of Croneberg's career-best scenes, the film ends in a prescient encounter with Paul Giamatti, whose presence always looms in the world outside.

Like Cronenberg's last film A Dangerous Method (2011), Cosmopolis is insanely talky, written in brainy dialogue delivered with stilted unease. It is truly a language movie, structured like James Joyce's Ulysses in a series of episodic encounters built on lines that bruise and provoke. "Life is too contemporary," Binoche's character tells Eric. And that seems to be the main idea of this film. The world around Eric hurtles forth at lightspeed, where even the word "computer" is archaic and technology is at everyone's disposal, and is the cause of their ruination. Though Eric rigidly abides by ideals and obsessions—he gets a medical check-up everyday, he wants to feel something more than sex and empty human connections, and he doesn't even need that haircut—he is, at bottom, a nihilist. He rejects social conventions, makes his own rules and inhabits his own kind of enclosed utopia in that decked-out stretch limo.

Cronenberg shoots in tight close-ups with a wide-lens, so everything, like Eric's asymmetrical prostate, always appears a little off-kilter. A director known for his explorations of the body's (per)mutations, and its inevitable emergence with non-corporeal forms of capital, commerce and technology, Cronenberg is at the top of his game, here. Bouncing off one another like charged molecules, the ideas here are so plentiful that a second viewing seems paramount.

Cosmopolis will not succeed in the mainstream because it is too talky and too cerebral. But those who go the film looking to get their rocks off staring at Pattinson, the dark, chiseled prince of the Twilight films, won't be disappointed. The actor, in a brooding performance as Eric, is sexy-as-hell. Even the way he wields a revolver is erotic. And those eyes—my God, those eyes!—they could reduce you to a puddle of submission with one glance.

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Adolfo Jiménez Castro, Cannes 2012, Carlos Reygadas, David Cronenberg, Don DeLillo, Juliette Binoche, Mathieu Almaric, Nathalia Acevedo, Paul Giamatti, Robert Pattinson, Ryan Lattanzio, Samantha Morton,

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CANNES 2012: AQUÍ Y ALLÁ, SOFIA'S LAST AMBULANCE, HORS LES MURS—By Ryan Lattanzio

The 65th Cannes International Film Festival continues to yield numerous, and numinous, pleasures on my eighth day into the festival. In my last few days screening films at Critics' Week—for which I am a juror under the stewardship of Céline Sciamma (director of Water Lilies and Tomboy)—I've traveled to a peaceful mountain village in Mexico, to a weary city in Bulgaria and to a nightclub in Belgium.

These are the respective settings of the films Aquí y Allá (Antonio Méndez Esparza), Sofia's Last Ambulance (Ilian Metev) and Hors Les Murs (David Lambert). Each is a standout from the Critics' Week line-up, which ended today with a screening of Sofia. Tomorrow, the prizes, including the Camera d'Or and the Visionary Award, will be announced at L'Espace Miramar, a little place I've called home for the past week. Here, I deliberate and discuss with my fellow jurors, schmooze with directors and actors and feel an overall sense of belonging amongst fellow cinephiles.

Aquí y Allá [Facebook] is a calm, plaintive film about working-class life in Guerrero, Mexico. Director Esparaza captures the swift ebb and flow of nature—its fields in which working men toil, the mountainscape that surrounds their quotidian lives—with a lyricism akin to Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Yasujiro Ozu. A mundane family dinner shared by Pedro (Pedro de Los Santos Juárez) with his wife and two daughters takes on immense significance and power when framed by Esparaza's patient, confident cinematic hand. Having just returned from working in the U.S.—a place of promise that constantly hangs over these people, who are content in their little lives but who still, like the rest of us, have big dreams—Pedro finds his two daughters older and wiser, and his wife about to have their third child.

There is no big drama in Aquí y Allá, not a voice raised, nor even a tinge of hysteria. The people in Esparaza's film understand the smallness of their existence and despite having little money and modest dwellings, they seem grateful just to be alive. Esparaza imposes no agenda on his film. He simply wants us to encounter people in a place we have not seen, and his cast is comprised of non-professional actors whose restrained performances provide the film's naturalist underpin. Here's hoping this wonderful slice-of-life gets picked up for distribution.

My last Critics' Week screening, Ilian Metev's Sofia's Last Ambulance, was also among the best. Shot in what I think must be 16mm, this is a visually exuberant documentary about three dedicated people who drive an ambulance in a fatigued city in Bulgaria. There's a dearth of medical professionals in the city, we learn, so the chain-smoking, unflagging trio is constantly in high demand. As they race through the day and night to rescue drug addicts, children and pregnant women, the possibility of a car crash or radio failure looms overheard with every screeching turn and careen of the vehicle.

Though some opening remarks on the film by one of the Critics' Week selection committee members suggested the metaphoric content of the film and its comment on an impaired Bulgarian society, Metev simply films what he wants to film, with no immediately grand intentions. Again, like Aquí y Allá, Sofia is a kind of slice-of-life, but it is also a harrowing reality, and a very compelling doc.

Earlier in the week, David Lambert's Hors Les Murs screened at the festival. Though the film is not perfect, it is certainly a solid new entry in a canon of gay cinema that seems to be getting better and better. No longer are we limited to the mediocre, tasteless selection on Netflix Instant. Lambert's lush, somber romance between two very different men in Belgium recalls the broken romance in Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, a film the director himself cited as an inspiration.

Ilir (Guillaume Gouix) is an Albanian bass player moonlighting as a bartender. One night, he picks up Paulo (Matila Malliarakis), a young pianist trapped in a straight relationship. Ilir is masculine, beautiful and a little cold, while Paulo is overly romantic, needy, and wan. The two hardly seem a good match, and they get off to a rocky start, but eventually they fall in love but are faced with challenges when Ilir gets arrested for possession of drugs. The film veers off course a little in scenes about drug smuggling across the border; but, Hors Les Murs really shines in its depiction of a young gay romance which blossoms after a momentary hook-up. Lambert directs with a tenderness and respect for his characters, in whose plight we feel empathy, even some relatability. Though we don't always adore these men—they can be, at times volatile and frustrating and hypocritical—we can at least see within them the presence of real people living real lives. Hopefully there is more to come from Lambert, because Hors Les Murs, despite being a conventional love story, breaks new ground for gay film.

Thanks again to the San Francisco Film Society, the Consulate General of France in San Francisco, the French American Cultural Society and Semaine de la Critique for making my trip possible.

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Antonio Méndez Esparza, Cannes 2012, Céline Sciamma, David Lambert, Guillaume Gouix, Ilian Metev, Matila Malliarakis, Pedro de los Santos Juárez, Ryan Lattanzio,

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YBCA: NEW FILIPINO CINEMA—NIÑO (2011)

The 2010 edition of the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) introduced me to Filipino cinema. I took a festival studies approach to SFIAAFF's Filipino sidebar (Filipino Cinema and "Imagined Communities") and compiled a critical overview of Lino Brocka's Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (You Have Been Weighed and Found Wanting, 1974) as a sampling of SFIAAFF's mini-retrospective honoring Brocka. Then I solicited and retained the cooperation of the three Philippine film critics championed by Alexis Tioseco in his piece "Wishful Thinking for Philippine Cinema"—Francis "Oggs" Cruz, Eduardo "Dodo" Dayao, and Richard "Chard" Bolisay—all three who consented to interviews. Oggs and Chard further granted permission for me to republish their reviews of Yanggaw (Affliction, 2008). I enjoyed working with and learning from all three of these young gentlemen so much, that I continue to solicit their advice and counsel concerning all films Filipino to this day.

Thus, I was especially pleased when Joel Shepard advised of an upcoming program of "New Filipino Cinema" programmed for Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), June 7-10 and June 17, 2012. Featuring 29 films, 24 of them U.S. premieres, "New Filipino Cinema" is the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Filipino cinema presented in the United States. Shepard explains: "New Filipino Cinema is a big fat snapshot of the diverse range of filmmaking going on right now—narrative features, documentaries, and experimental work. The clichéd images of the Philippines that most foreigners are familiar with are of poverty, prostitution, and crime. Those social ills are represented in this series, but they absolutely do not define this complex and extraordinary country. It's important to understand this. I was also careful to represent filmmaking taking place outside of Manila, and to include many women directors."

"New Filipino Cinema" kicks off on Thursday, June 7, 2012 with an opening reception to welcome director Loy Arcenas, who will be attending his opening night film Niño (2011). My Philippine colleagues Oggs Cruz and Dodo Dayao encouraged me to watch Niño when it screened earlier this year at the 2012 Palm Springs International Film Festival, and I found it to be an enjoyable and affecting melodrama about a family as worn about the edges as the delapidated house in which they live out their circumscribed lives. The patriarch has fallen into a coma and his sister Celia, a former opera star, tries to miraculously revive him by dressing her grandson up as Santo Niño de Cebú, the Philippine variant of Santo Niño de Atocha, seen here wandering whimsically far from his holy chair, running throughout the old house, and among the complicated—if not quite modern—lives of its inhabitants. The film's comic flourishes are its highlights.

Shepard deepens the perspective: "The image of the child Christ, the Santo Niño, holds special significance to the Filipino faithful. It is said to cause miracles, the idol a perfect representation of the country's strange conflation of religion and superstition. It is why a young boy has been dressed up as the Santo Niño in this clever dissection of a fading aristocratic family. With the patriarch fallen ill, the debts piling up, the house crumbling, and the family falling apart, all that's left is to pray for a miracle. With studied grace, Niño explores a social class rarely depicted in Filipino films, revealing a deeply human core to aristocracy."

At Lessons From the School of Inattention, Oggs Cruz details that exploration: "There is a reason why people are fascinated with ruins, despite the evident disrepair and decay. Ruins are permanent reminders of a distant glorious past. In Loy Arcenas' Niño, the Lopez-Aranda clan is portrayed with the same fascination, as if the family were ruins on display: the bits of opera that Celia sings to bedridden Gaspar with her aging soprano are the broken columns, the stories told by Gaspar of his blossoming political position are the damaged statues, and the rustic house, its remaining furniture and ornaments and the anecdotes of the loyal household help of the house's former prominence are the collapsed edifices, the wilted gardens, the burnt arcs, all of which are faint indications of the family’s expired extravagance." For a first-time filmmaker, Cruz finds Niño a "feat to behold", and stresses Arcenas' "disciplined craftsmanship."

At Piling Piling Pelikua, Dodo Dayao writes: "Fides Cuyugan-Asensio is indomitable as the lapsed diva and her temperament becomes the film's: skittish, fractious, wistful, elegant, and just the tiniest bit cuckoo."

Blurbs On Contemporary Filipino Films adds: "The effort to create an envelope-pushing film concocted over jaunty pieces of melodrama, gothic humor, opera music and camp with a Hallmark strain that’s too close for comfort, warrants some recognition. But it is through Rody Vera's excellent screenplay that we see, hear, smell, taste, and feel the angst the characters lived through, with their varied forms of displacement and agony rattling in the most smoldering of friction."

At Pelikula Tumblr, Jansen Musico has a brief conversation with Arcenas, wherein he explains: "Rody and I love irony and we much agreed how much irony fills up our daily lives. We wanted to explore this in the film, within the context of a comedy of manners. But Filipino life is a hijinks of comedy and sorrow and so we decided that Niño should be a study of the present Filipino psyche walking the fine line between tragedy and comedy."

Preceding the film, Alleluia Panis of Kularts will perform "Ritwal" with vocalist Kristine Sinajon.

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Chard Bolisay, Dodo Dayao, Fides Cuyugan-Asensio, Filipino Cinema, Joel Shepard, Lino Brocka, Loy Arcenas, Oggs Cruz, Rody Vera, YBCA,

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CINEMA GUILD: NE CHANGE RIEN (2009)—DVD Review by Alex Hansen

Pedro Costa's Ne Change Rien (2009) is a glimpse into the abyss that is process: long hours spent pouring endless energy and concentration into minute details that the majority won't even notice, perfecting an expression, giving it a power to punch the viewer / listener in the stomach, wielding only a silence, a gesture, a cut, a word, an unexpected note.

Jeanne Balibar is presented as the creative driving force behind the music—it's her name on the album just as the films are "by" Costa—but both receive aid and inspiration from their peripheral collaborators. Balibar's music is co-written. She is guided by the musicians who play with her, patiently persisting, playing and replaying until she can find the tempo and get her phrasing right. Costa's films, likewise, are created with the input of those who appear in them. They bring to life onscreen versions of their own life stories, leading Costa and his films to their eventual expression. Both draw inspiration from material that's come before, which they use as a foundation to build on, whether it be a "Superfly" sample or a Jacques Tourneur plot. Even Costa's shooting methods mirror the musical process. Just because a scene's been committed to tape doesn't mean he won't revisit the material and shoot it again weeks later, allowing the atmosphere and "vibe" of the room and/or the day to imbue the performance.

Costa shed the baggage of celluloid after making Ossos (1997), feeling it constrained and imposed on his process too much. One can imagine him reacting similarly to Balibar as she rehearses La Perichole. She isn't in control of her process. She's stopped every other syllable to make adjustments. Her frustration visibly builds as she's forced to bend to another's will and the demands of the medium, much as Costa himself once had to bend to the needs of film (lights, crew, etc.).

Costa's latest work—this and the 2010 short O Nosso Homem, another variation on the footage used in Tarrafal (2007) and The Rabbit Hunters (2007) and included on the Masters of Cinema's must-have Colossal Youth (2006) set—looks towards the past, without a hint of the future. Compare that to a filmmaker with whom he is often compared: Lisandro Alonso, whose Untitled (Letter to Serra, 2011) similarly deals with the filmmaker's past work but dangles a few tantalizing possibilities about what is to come. Will there be another shift in his process? Where does Costa go from here? Where is there to go after In Vanda's Room (2000) and Colossal Youth? Perhaps the answer, or maybe just a hint, can be found in O Nosso Homem, which proves the malleability of images. Just because something's been done or seen before doesn't mean it's potential has been exhausted.

It comes as no surprise that The Cinema Guild's DVD release of Ne Change Rien is top shelf. Image and sound are stellar and the extras are plentiful with a few deleted scenes and a sampling of Balibar's "Tronomettes" (musical sketches featuring accompaniment by a metronome). Cinema Guild continues their habit of including short films when possible (and bless them for it), as their Manoel de Oliveira and Agnes Varda discs, and the inclusion of an early Bela Tarr short on their upcoming Turin Horse release attest. The real gem is Costa's short film The End of a Love Affair, a modest piece whose pleasures are derived from the simple act of viewing, much like how the subject of Costa's short watches the street from the window. The curtains billow in from the edge of the frame. Light dances on the bed sheet and across the chest of the man. The title song joins in after a spell; but, we learn nothing about the man. In the parlance of Billy Brown, we "span time" with him. And in many ways, that's all we should ask of the moving image.

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Alex Hansen, Jeanne Balibar, Lisandro Alonso, Masters of Cinema, Pedro Costa, The Cinema Guild,

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CANNES 2012: AMOUR, LAURENCE ANYWAYS and RUST AND BONE—By Ryan Lattanzio

Thanks to the good people at the San Francisco Film Society, the Consulate General of France in SF, the French American Cultural Society and La Semaine de la Critique, I was sent last week to the 65th Cannes International Film Festival as a critic and jury member. Six days into the festival, and I have managed to see a ton of films both good and bad, and I am living the dream of the magpie cinephile.

To start, the best film I have seen so far in the Main Competition is Michael Haneke's Amour. Who knew that the Austrian provocateur behind such films as The Seventh Continent (1989), The Piano Teacher (2001), Cache (2005) and The White Ribbon (2009 Palme d'Or winner) was capable of feeling anything? Amour is the director's most emotional, tender film to date. It marks a shift in his career that resembles late Ingmar Bergman or Carl Theodor Dreyer: restrained, pensive and deeply felt.

Amour is about love, of course, but it is also two hours of a woman dying. Yet Haneke renders this depressing material redemptive and utterly compelling. It's as good a rumination as any about getting old and getting on in life.

The film is also a tribute to seasoned French actors, starring Jean Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva as Georges and Anne, an elderly married couple whose amour is put to the greatest test of all when Anne suffers a stroke that paralyzes half of her body. Georges, with the help of his daughter Eva (Isabelle Huppert), must care for Anne in the final months of her life. We know from the outset that she is going to die. The film opens with police breaking into the couple's apartment to find Anne splayed on the bed amid a funereal bouquet. Natch, in Haneke tradition, this image cuts to the title card Amour.

Trintignant is my pick for Best Actor at the festival, which ends on the 27th when the Palme d'Or and other awards are announced. As Georges, he is calm, sensible and devoted to his wife, yet we also see the personal toll Anne's condition takes on him in several unsettling dream sequences which punctuate this lovely, elegiac film.

With the exception of one crucial scene, Amour never leaves the apartment, which looks more like the chateau in Bergman's Cries and Whispers than a bourgeois flat. We are confined to these large rooms with Georges and Anne for two hours, but instead of suffocating, it's riveting. Haneke does not sanitize with cliches or sentimentality, and like all his films, Amour is starkly realized, but this time with more heart than head (something new for Mr. Haneke, otherwise known for his cinema of nihilism and dread). I walked out of the theater completely wrecked. I didn't know Haneke could make me feel such feelings.

Another excellent film, this one from the Un Certain Regard category, is enfant terrible Xavier Dolan's Laurence Anyways. With this glam epic, Dolan has made his most personal film yet. All he had to do was not cast himself in it.

With its huge, episodic structure spanning 10 years in the life of a couple, Laurence—shot with vibrant color in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio that immediately evokes Dolan's cinephilic nostalgia—smacks of '90s era Pedro Almodovar in telling, through broad brush strokes and intimate moments, the story of a man who realizes he was meant to be a woman. The title character, played with sensitivity and bravado by Melvil Poupaud (a regular cast member of Ruiz and Ozon), becomes a transsexual over the course of the movie but his girlfriend Frederique (the effervescent Suzanne Clément whose performance recalls Kate Winslet's as the manic pixie dream girl in Eternal Sunshine) decides to stick with him. She wrestles with this decision for the rest of her life, as Laurence and Fred are constantly on-and-off, hot and cold.

Given that the film clocks in at nearly three hours, and though it feels surprisingly breezy, Laurence, like Dolan's coiffed pompadour, is going to need a pair of scissors if it's ever going to find an audience across the Atlantic. But it's a big, beautiful film, where we really get the sense that these two flawed but endlessly watchable people are crazy in love with each other. Dolan pumps '80s New Wave tunes, sometimes ad nauseum, into the film and its uber-'90s aesthetic (the shoulder pads, my god those shoulder pads). Sometimes his tendency to smear his style all over his substance does a disservice to the characters and the story, but Laurence is leaps beyond Dolan's previous efforts J'ai tue ma mere (2009) and Les amours imaginaires (2010). Though the 23-year-old director is not quite ready to sack his punk sensibilities and aesthetic attitudes, Laurence is a mature film, a near-masterpiece that's been one of my favorites at the festival.

A film I was far less thrilled with but one that is generating a lot of buzz around La Croisette is Jacques Audiard's Rust and Bone, or as it is known in its very chewy French title De rouille et d'os. It is Audiard's follow-up to the 2009 political drama A Prophet. Like that film, Rust and Bone takes its characters and audience on a grand tour of emotional hell. Overwrought melodrama with some seriously good acting make up this otherwise flavorless picture about (you guessed it) two broken souls who come together amid the scraps of their personal tragedies.

As Stephanie, an orca trainer turned paraplegic after a random accident on the job, Marion Cotillard throws herself headlong into her stripped down, untreated performance. The role churns the actress through the wringer and finds her doing some brutal gymnastics of grief and otherwise. Cotillard, along with Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead) as Ali, a single dad, amateur boxer and antihero par excellence, could potentially nab the Best Actress prize. In one scene in a hospital—as much as I hate screaming scenes in hospitals—she articulates her emotions with rare fluency. I refuse to dispel the nature of her accident, as forthcoming American trailers no doubt will, but the way she cries out mes jambes, mes jambes is some of the most gut-wrenching, heart-crushing stuff I've witnessed at the festival.

With its contrived incident-driven plot, which is overly determinant of the characters' lives, the film stinks of Alejandro González Iñárritu gone out of control. But there is also, undoubtedly, a reckoning with cinema Americana, like that of Darren Aronofsky, with the film's trembling camera and gritty lens filter. But at the beating bloody heart of the film is the love story of Stephanie and Ali, who meet at a club where Ali is a bouncer. Beneath all the film's ramblings about working class malaise, and a narrative momentum that's frozen in melo-molasses, there is something so moving about the film that I cannot shake. Plus, it uses Katy Perry's pop ballad "Firework" in such an unexpectedly tender way, I couldn't help but feel my heart strings pulse and pull a little bit. Rust and Bone will be nominated for Academy Awards, mark my words, and it's really going to work with American audiences.

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Emmanuelle Riva, Isabelle Huppert, Jacques Audiard, Jean Louis Trintignant, Marion Cotillard, Matthias Schoenaerts, Melvil Poupaud, Michael Haneke, Ryan Lattanzio, Suzanne Clément, Xavier Dolan,

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BLOODSWORTH: AN INNOCENT MAN—The Evening Class Interview With Gregory Bayne

Quite possibly, Gregory Bayne might know more about alternate funding strategies for independent film—including crowd funding—than most Idaho filmmakers. This "faithful pragmatist" has funded four successful Kickstarter campaigns for three separate films (A Person of Interest, Jens Pulver / Driven, and Bloodsworth: An Innocent Man), negotiated a hefty distribution deal through video on demand and streaming aggregates, has written columns for Filmmaker magazine, and has been cherry-picked as an expert panelist to discuss funding for independent film at this weekend's Idaho Cineposium Film Conference (May 18-19, 2012).

Keen to the association between crowd funding and audience building, Bayne follows-up his successful Kickstarter campaign for documentary-in-progress Bloodsworth: An Innocent Man with an evening with Kirk Bloodsworth at Boise's Egyptian Theater on Thursday, May 17.

As part of a suite of research interviews conducted for an overview piece for Fusion magazine on Idaho film production, Bayne and I sat down to discuss Bloodsworth late last month.

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Michael Guillén: Gregory, you started with a feature and have now shifted to documentaries. Does that mean that documentary filmmaking has become more your medium or are these simply the stories you want to tell right now?

Gregory Bayne: Well, you can easily get pigeonholed. For me it was more like, "What's the most reasonable thing for me to do after Driven? What will people be waiting for? Likely a documentary." I like documentaries. I like the stories that I can tell through them that maybe I can't tell through narrative features. It took me a long time to even say, "I'm a filmmaker", but that's what I do for a living and that's how I spend my time. But I guess I want it to be more encompassing? I want to be format-agnostic and genre-agnostic, y'know?

Basically, filmmaking is just storytelling for me. For example, my next project is Bloodsworth because Kirk's story really intrigued me. It's a great story to tell. Somebody had been looking into making his story into a feature; but, I liked him, I liked him as a person and I thought that the best way to tell his story was to do a documentary and let him be the star of it. Stylistically, it will be different to a degree than Driven; but, they're the same in that they're both stories centered on their subjects. I feel that the State of Maryland has told their version of the story several times at court, people have read it in the news, but what does it feel like to be a guy ripped off the face of the earth and thrown into prison for something he didn't do? What's that story? I can tell that story better as a documentary through somebody's true experience rather than trying to dramatize it.

Guillén: Clearly, finding the story is essential to building an audience. And a story of direct human experience has a better chance of having an audience relate to that direct experience through a shared humanity. But your decision to tell that story through documentary involves many choices along the way that intrigue me. For example, with Driven—and, I anticipate, with Bloodsworth—I respect that the story is told through the voice of its subject. You don't have a lot of talking heads in Driven, for example, to tell Pulver's story. Jens Pulver tells his own story. And it sounds like you're taking a similar approach with Bloodsworth? In some ways, it might be considered a no-no to give one face so much screen time; but, in the case of Jens Pulver, it revealed an emotional authenticity that engaged the audience. You can run with emotional authenticity for hours, I think.

Bayne: I totally agree. To be perfectly honest, I mostly watch narrative films and mostly just wanted to direct narrative features. That was my initial impulse. But then I fell into editing documentaries and began to like that approach to storytelling. I felt documentaries gave me a greater sense of how to tell stories than all the years of writing and watching dramatized narratives. One of my major inspirations are the Maysles Brothers, especially their film Salesman (1969). I love that movie. It's so interesting and heartbreaking and real and raw. One thing that documentaries have over narrative features—unless they're genuine classics—is this level of timelessness. So the Maysles Brothers inspired me and, more recently, Errol Morris's films, and one Chris Smith did called Collapse (2009), which I watched before making Driven and thought, "Oh wow!" Have you seen Collapse?

Guillén: I haven't.

Bayne: It's about this guy that supposedly predicted the financial collapse. He's something of a conspiracy theorist and Collapse is basically a movie that's just him in a room being interviewed through several different camera angles. It's just him for 80 minutes and I thought, "Holy shit! This is incredibly interesting." The guy was totally engaging and I knew from meeting Jens and having talked with him that there would be no problem with him carrying a movie too. There was a certain amount of the trifecta going on: a great back story, a totally engaging personality, and he had something happening. It's the same with Kirk Bloodsworth. The intensity level turns up to 11 from Driven in terms of what he experienced: being wrongfully convicted, sentenced to death, having to go through that, and then being the first death row inmate in the U.S. to be exonerated through DNA evidence.

My whole point is that—through watching films like Errol Morris' The Fog of War (2003)—if you see these engaging personalities and you allow them to speak and know you have the editor's touch in the end, you can in an authentic way shape what they're saying and tell it to the audience who is watching.

Guillén: Let's talk a bit about where you are with Bloodsworth. You're doing a benefit at the Egyptian Theater on Thursday, May 17, 2012 with Kirk Bloodworth in attendance to Q&A with the audience? My understanding is that part of that event is to film audience reaction? How much longer will you need after that to finish up the film?

Bayne: I also like the process to be as simple as possible. I'm working on two tracks with the Bloodsworth story. Along with my own documentary, we're doing a short piece for PBS for some new program they're developing. I filmed him throughout February back East but I'm not sure that footage will actually be part of the film. The concept I have for Bloodsworth encompasses four elements. First is his speaking in front of people and telling his story from beginning to end. It's compelling and he's a great storyteller. He's shaped his story really well and it resonates because—even though it's second nature and a little bit rehearsed at this point—it's still very emotional and authentic. It comes back to that. So, having him in front of an audience telling his story is just engaging. I look forward to being able to shoot that.

My favorite quote about documentaries is from Errol Morris who said that the best thing and the worst thing about documentaries is that they can be about anything. I love that and it's one of the things that draws me to documentary filmmaking over narrative filmmaking. That principle could be inherent in narrative filmmaking as well, but there's still formulaic storytelling tropes that one way or the other you have to fit in. With documentaries you're bound to a degree with the tenets of storytelling but the way in which you present the story is wide open.

So, the first element is filming him in front of an audience. Then there's the second element of interviewing him, much like I described the Collapse interview, with several cameras. I'm going to sit down with him for four solid days, which is what I did with Jens, and go through the whole story, hoping through that process to get beyond the technical aspects and go deeper. The third element is archival footage from day one of the murder, all the coverage around it, his arrest, his conviction, his appeal, prison.

Guillén: That sounds like a costly element of the film?

Bayne: Yeah. I don't know how costly it's going to be yet. It depends on how much of the archival footage I'll actually use. First, I have to pay a fee to get the footage to look at and then—once I actually use it—I'll have to pay money.

Guillén: You have earned a reputation as being something of a master of crowd funding. How successful were your Kickstarter campaigns for Bloodsworth? Could you use a Kickstarter campaign to offset the costs of securing archival footage?

Bayne: The original Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth was fully funded. The way it works in the documentary world—which I'm sure you're fully familiar with—is that you can't get any money from any agencies or granting organizations unless you're already way deep into the process. I raised the original money to get through the initial production process to come up with 20-25 minutes of good footage that tells a story, gives the scope of what I'm making, and present it to people at Sundance, at the Ford Foundation, to people at PBS, etc.

I didn't want to do the Kickstarter campaign because it was already my fourth, all of which have been successful. That's nice, but, I do perceive a burnout. So I was really nervous about the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth. I had tried other ways to raise the money. The initial seed money I was supposed to get fell through but I knew there were a lot of things I needed to do that would require money, because the budget for Bloodsworth would probably be larger than it was for Driven. So I went ahead and did the Kickstarter campaign and I did it for various reasons. First, a lot of people just think about the money-making aspect of Kickstarter; but, if you treat crowd funding right, if you respect the process, and follow through with what you say you're going to do, Kickstarter can be a pretty amazing audience-building tool.

I had a nice track record already. For Person of Interest, we did what we said we were going to do with that movie and it got out. With Driven, there were two campaigns and, again, when the movie was done and it was released, everyone got what they were promised. So with the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth, it was nervewracking and yet it worked. It also gave me the opportunity to create another level of audience for this new project that I didn't have prior. It's always good to do that. It gets the conversation rolling.

The campaign kind of sucked because it had the Thanksgiving holiday right in the middle of it and I thought it was going to be very hard to make the funds happen. But the story got picked up all over the place—there was a tidbit in The Washington Post and coverage in all the major online magazines—and the reason the Kickstarter campaign for Bloodsworth got picked up all over the place was because the Idaho State Tourism Board sent out a press release for me. I called them and I said, "Hey, remember that time you said that you really liked what I was doing and to call on you if you could ever be of help?" And they said, "Yes!" I was a little nervous towards the end of the campaign but then one day this writer who I've never met threw in $5,000 and that was the last little chip that needed to fall and then it was done.

The nice thing about this experience was this it was my quickest Kickstarter campaign. Ordinarily, to get a campaign 10% funded early on is the best strategy possible. If you can make it there, oddly enough you can get it funded the rest of the way. Within 24 hours, the Bloodsworth campaign went past 10% funded and then the work really began. Still, again, it went the fastest of all my campaigns in achieving the 10% but, again, I think that had to do with all this work I'd done prior, had delivered on my promises, and people were beginning to trust that I wasn't an asshole.

Guillén: So any sense of when the film will be ready to be released?

Bayne: Well, I'll have the bulk of the footage I'll need by the end of May, but then the animation aspect is a new element for me that I've never worked with before and I'm assuming that's going to take more time than I imagine it will. Half of the film will be animated by Matthew Wade.

Guillén: How did you decide to film this story? Had you read some news coverage and that's what lured you into the project? How did you then contact Kirk Bloodsworth?

Bayne: A friend of mine in Boise was friends with Bloodsworth and she had read Tim Junkin's book Bloodsworth: The True Story of One Man's Triumph over Injustice. She contacted me about the possibility of making a film about him, gave me the book and I started reading it, and I thought, "This is a great story." Then Bloodsworth and his people all watched Driven and thought I was pretty good at what I was doing so I sat down with Kirk and decided we would make a documentary about his story. That's how the process began. It was very simple.

Guillén: When you approach a prospective subject, what do you offer them? What do they get out of your telling their story?

Bayne: With Jens Pulver / Driven, because it's a first person movie, Jens owns half the movie. I think that's totally fair. I put in most of the equity, I made the movie and all that, so I should get something; but, then, Jens put in his life story. If Driven is making money right now and Jens isn't getting some of that, I would be a total asshole. So that's how I approach it. It's not like making a movie about Japanese whaling ships. When you're making a movie that's so specified and it's so definitively about one person and their story and they're investing their time to be with you and to tell their story and to allow you the creative freedom to make and own the movie, it nonetheless at the end of the day has to be shared. If there's a financial benefit, it's a shared financial benefit. I don't really see any other way to do it. You can litigate a project to the end of time, but there's a right and a wrong. If you're going to tell a story about a specific person and they're on camera for 90% of the movie, you both share the money, period.

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Chris Smith, Documentary, Errol Morris, Gregory Bayne, Jens Pulver, Kirk Bloodsworth, Matthew Wade, Maysles Brothers, Sagebrush, Tim Junkin,

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