New York Film Festival Preview II

Ne Change Rien (top), Independencia (middle), To Die Like a Man (bottom)

Here are images from three more of my must-see films, all by important directors making their belated New York Film Festival debuts this year.

The lovely black and white shot of actress Jeanne Balibar is from Ne Change Rien, a very personal documentary about Balibar's singing career by Pedro Costa, director of the extraordinary Colossal Youth. It's certain to be a visual treat.

Then there's a film by a very different Portuguese director, João Pedro Rodrigues, To Die Like a Man. This is Rodrigues's third feature but the first to appear in the festival, for which I credit Dennis Lim, a newcomer to the festival Selection Committee this year and a major champion of Rodrigues's work. See his fascinating article/interview in the recent Cannes issue of Cinema Scope magazine. (http://www.cinema-scope.com/cs39/spot_lim_rodrigues.html) I loved Rodrigues's first two films, O Fantasma and Odete (Two Drifters). He specializes in movies about marginal or outsider gay characters, and Lim compares To Die Like a Man, a feel-bad film about an aging drag performer, to one of the best recent gay films, Jacques Nolot's frankly autobiographical Before I Forget. Expect some audience walkouts with this one, which as my friend Juan says is part of the fun.

The festival chose not to include the controversially violent Cannes best screenplay winner, Brillante Mendoza's Kinatay, in favor of another emerging Filipino director, Raya Martin's Independencia. The program describes it as a "stylized tale of a mother and son hiding in the mountains after the US takeover of the islands." I'm eager to see this work by the acclaimed, if virtually unknown, Martin. Independencia and To Die Like a Man are the kind of challenging works that the festival should be applauded for including alongside more mainstream arthouse favorites like Almodovar (predictably grabbing the Closing Night slot with Broken Embraces) and Haneke.

The Centerpiece film is the highly regarded Sundance feature with the unwieldy title Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire. Also promising are Min Ye, Malian director Souleymane Cissé's first new film in over a decade, and Maren Ade's Everyone Else, which comes highly praised by Kent Jones in the current Film Comment.

To wrap up, there will be a screening of what is purportedly the oldest surviving Korean film, Crossroads of Youth, a 1934 silent film which will have live music and a benshi-style offscreen narrator. This should be a memorable event. With so many interesting films, many without a distributor, I will probably set a new record this year for the number of films I attend.

There are also sidebars on classic Chinese cinema and Indian musical director Guru Dutt. The films are yet to be announced, as is the lineup for Views from the Avant-Garde and perhaps a couple revivals at the Walter Reade Theater. Stay tuned.