Tough Bridges to Build
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Road trip! The Criterion Mobile Closet is heading to SXSW. On its first venture outside of New York City, we’ll be swinging open the Closet’s doors on March 7, 8, 9, and 10, and for the Austin Chronicle’s Kimberley Jones, this is “swoon-worthy news.” The Chronicle’s Richard Whittaker, in the meantime, has been talking with Andrew Bujalski about his new three-screen installation There There, which draws on his 2022 film, opens today, and will be on view through March 8.
On Thursday evening, Slamdance opened for the first time in Los Angeles. “Just every single response was embracing and like, let’s go,” festival director Taylor Miller tells the Los Angeles Times’s Mark Olsen about the move from Park City, Utah. “And the amazing other part of this is so many people were like, ‘I’ve never been able to go and now I’m going to go.’”
Spectres: The Cinema of Jacques Rivette also opened yesterday. The comprehensive retrospective will run at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London through June 1. A multi-venue, citywide retrospective devoted to the work of the late experimental filmmaker Amy Halpern is on in Chicago from today through the weekend, and Tone Glow has all the details. Ben Rivers will introduce select screenings of his work at Harvard Film Archive from today through March 10, and on March 4, New York’s Light Industry will present Ah, Liberty!, a program of short films Rivers has curated.
Doc Fortnight 2025 is happening at the Museum of Modern Art through March 7, and at Hyperallergic, Dan Schindel spotlights several films “addressing art and artists.” For Screen Slate, Elissa Suh talks with Haley Mlotek, the author of No Fault: A Memoir of Romance and Divorce, about the Divorced Woman’s Festival she’s programmed for Metrograph in New York, and Jonathan Mackris writes about António Reis and Margarida Cordeiro, “whose informal trilogy of films shot in the rural northeast of Portugal—Trás-os-Montes (1976), Ana (1982), and Rosa de Areia (1989)—offer a counter-example to today’s ‘internationalized’ cinema.”
The Theater of the Matters is presenting programs of work by Reis and Cordeiro at Metrograph and Chicago’s Doc Films, and cofounding member Edward McCarry talks with two of their students, filmmaker Pedro Costa and sound recordist and designer, director, and producer Joaquim Pinto. “Trás-os-Montes opened a lot of doors and windows, in every sense,” says Costa.
This week’s highlights:
- The nationwide tour of the new restoration of Zeinabu irene Davis’s Compensation (1999) begins today at Film at Lincoln Center. Michelle A. Banks, who founded the Onyx Theatre Company to create a stage for both herself and other deaf women of color, and John Earl Jelks (Exhibiting Forgiveness) play two Chicago couples. Malindy and Arthur fall for each other in 1910; Malaika and Nico meet in the 1990s. “Compensation is flush with ideas, chief among them the ways in which differences and abilities can be bridged—and the ways they cannot, even between those most ardently committed to understanding each other,” writes Melissa Anderson at 4Columns. “Now revived,” Compensation “should enter the ranks of the immortal.” Davis discusses her film with Robert Daniels (Reverse Shot) and Marya E. Gates (RogerEbert.com).
- “Chantal and I, it just happened all by itself, without us saying, ‘We’re going to work together for our whole lives.’ It was great,” Aurore Clément tells the Guardian’s Phil Hoad. Chantal Akerman and Clément made several films together, but the focus of Hoad’s interview is Les rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), featuring Clément as a filmmaker touring through Europe to promote her latest movie. The conversations Anna has during a series of brief encounters touch on “three things,” says Clément. “It’s Europe, it’s the mother, and the Shoah.” Akerman and Clément scoured more than thirty stores to find the right high heels for Anna. “She said the sound of the heels was the sound of Germany,” recalls Clément. “She didn’t have to say more.”
- To mark the centenary of Claude Lanzmann’s birth, the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War and the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, and the fortieth anniversary of the premiere of Shoah, the Berlinale has screened the film along with Guillaume Ribot’s All I Had Was Nothingness, which the Hollywood Reporter’s Jordan Mintzer calls “a worthy behind-the-scenes documentary.” Philip Oltermann talks with Ribot for the Guardian, and in the New York Times, Beatrice Loayza notes that the Berlinale’s “commemorative programming . . . plays out amid growing concerns that Germany’s culture of Holocaust remembrance is stifling the free speech of other artists.” For Loayza, “the purpose of anniversary screenings is not merely to pay tribute to past works, but to reconsider and expand them—to turn them, like prisms under a light, and see how they reflect the seemingly distant circumstances of today.”
- “I try to find my own filmmaking language and style that does not just replicate great directors like Lanzmann,” Wang Bing tells Jung Sung-il, one of South Korea’s most respected film critics, in a 2022 conversation that Jawni Han has translated for Notebook. For Jung, Dead Souls (2018), in which survivors of the Jiabiangou Labor Camp in northwestern China tell their stories, is Wang’s “masterpiece.” Wang says that he “wanted to unveil all of China’s history by zeroing in on one major historical event . . . In some ways, what happened in Jiabiangou is representative of social and political life in China between 1949 and 1979. In depicting the early history of the Communist rule, I hoped to compare history and cinema, and strike a balance between cinema and the real. The stories from Jiabiangou allowed me to do just that.”
- Vulture’s Rachel Handler has a lively conversation with Amy Irving about Joan Micklin Silver’s Crossing Delancey (1988). Irving stars as Izzy, the manager of a bookstore in uptown Manhattan. Her bubbe (Reizl Bozyk) is trying to set her up with Sam (Peter Riegert), who runs a pickle stand on the Lower East Side. In the New York Times, Jason Bailey notes that Crossing Delancey’s “most vocal fans are not the boomers and elder Gen-Xers who were going to the movies when it was released; it’s beloved by Millennials and Zoomers who may not have even been alive when it hit theaters.” For one thing, Micklin Silver’s reputation is on the rise, and for another, “vintage NYC movies bring back memories for residents of things they miss, and show younger viewers and recent transplants what they never had.” But “above all,” Crossing Delancey is “a classic romantic comedy, full of flawed but charming characters, sparkling dialogue, and relatable dilemmas.”
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