Great new films from First Run/Icarus Films
First Run/Icarus Films, like other small indie film distributors in NYC including Zeitgeist, New Yorker, Kino and others, distribute most of the best films released each year. Recently I previewed five of their new releases, borrowing some for WV filmmakers…..
The two main films I wanted to see are called “Can’t Do It in Europe” and “Losers and Winners.” Both films have won many awards internationally but not received much promotion in this country. “”Europe” is about “reality tourism,” people visiting actual work sites. In this case, Europeans travel to Bolivia to watch young boys suffer horribly as they work as gold miners in a giant mountain of gold where millions of people have died since the Spanish came to the Western Hemisphere. I found it very painful to watch - which I guess is the idea. “Winners” was not quite as painful but still not a laugh. It shows Chinese workers dismantle the largest coke plant in the world in Germany, moving it to the New China. Taking 18-months, it is an amazing document showing what “globalization” really means. Hopefully the WV Labor History Assn. will be able to show these films sometime in the future.
“Teeth,” a new film looking at “an investigation into consumer culture identification and good smiles” was interesting given WV’s ranking as having the worst teeth of is seniors of any state. The NY Times and other publications recently have been writing about this health reality. I also loaned it to a friend who teaches at WV Tech.
First Run/Icarus Films has probably the best collection of films about philosophy of any organization. I hadn’t seen their film “Jacques Lacan Speaks” which didn’t make much sense to me, but I loaned it to Gordon Simmons who knows Lacan’s work much better.
Jason Brown, a leading WV filmmaker now working on a documentary on the making and meaning of “Matewan” he calls “Them That Work” asked me to find any and all films on the “making of…..” any film I could find. There is a nice new film, “Once Upon a Time….Rome, Open City,” about perhaps the making of the most intense and important film made anywhere since WWII, Rossellini’s “Rome, Open City.”(1945) It used amateurs as actors, and was literally filmed on the streets of Rome just after the Nazi Liberation. The movement created, “neorealism,” is just as important now as it was in 1945. I also previewed this new film on Iranian cinema which now creates some of the best films in the world, and has for more than a decade. Unfortunately, “Iran: A Cinematographic Revolution” is NOT about all of these great films from Abas Kirostami and others, but rather the official Islamic movies made after the Revolution deposed the Shah. I think that only one film I have ever heard of is discussed. ( I had a letter published in a national library magazine suggesting that librarians watch some of the great Iranian films despite the massive tensions politically between our two countries.)
