March 17-23, 2005

screen picks

Screen Picks

by Sam Adams

Middle East Week (through Sun., March 20, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6575) This annual film series, co-presented by International House and the University of Pennsylvania's Middle East Center, once again proves well worth the wait. The highlight is an evening of documentaries (Thu., 7 p.m.) devoted to the changing, and unchanging, status of women in the Muslim world. The program begins with Ateyyat El Abnoud's 1971 documentary Horse of Mud, whose unvarnished black-and-white photography etches a timeless picture of Iranian women's struggle for equality. As a girl describes her thwarted desire to educate herself, the film supplies an image of horses cantering around a pole in ankle-deep mud — not the subtlest of symbols, but effective, as is the sight of young women stooping under the weight of freshly made bricks. Ebtisam Maraana's Paradise Lost is a first-person documentary about a Palestinian woman's investigation of her village's legendary outcast, a PLO activist whose name still produces anger and stony silence. Tracking her down in England, Marana finds Suaad outwardly free but pained by her exile, a contradiction the movie attempts to flatten with a trite moral.

The Ladies Room, which closes the evening, is the most revelatory film in the series. Mahnaz Afzali's hour-long documentary is set in a public restroom off a Tehran park that seems to have become an impromptu meeting place for the city's women; when one neglects to answer her cell phone, her mother knows just where to look. On the one hand, the film's outlook is unremittingly bleak: The first woman we meet, Maryam, describes suffering from epilepsy brought on by a blow from a policeman's club, drug addiction, her forced marriage to a 50-year-old man at the age of 12, and her father's execution, though the biggest shocker comes when she gives her age as 23, which is half as old as she looks. Sad-eyed Sepideh shows off the self-inflicted scars on her arm and dreamily contemplates suicide, musing, "I'd like to see blood spurting out of my hand." But the fact that the women have come together to discuss their lives, to say nothing of The Ladies Room's existence, is testament to a society aching for change, even if it's doubtful the film could ever be exhibited in its own country. At least the subject is marginally more permissible in fiction: Two of the documentary's subjects recall seeing the movie Women's Prison, a feature that, even in a censored version, set Iranian box-office records in 2002.

The series continues with Nabil Ayouch's Ali Zaoua (Fri., 8 p.m.), a brutal but sun-kissed neorealist drama set among the street children of Casablanca. Ayouch draws touching performances from his cast of pre-teen nonprofessionals (not to mention a chilling turn from Three Kings' Saïd Taghmaoui as a mute Fagin type), but the movie's leaps from street-level realism into animated fantasy aren't particularly sure-footed.

Ziad Hamzeh's documentary The Letter (Sat., 7 p.m.) hits nearer to home, focusing on Lewiston, Maine, a small town which became the center of international controversy when Mayor Larry Raymond wrote a letter asking the town's population of 1,100 newly arrived Somali refugees not to invite their friends and families, claiming his resources were "maxed-out." (A former mayor points out that the actual expenditure was less than "one half of 1 percent," and that the town received federal funding earmarked for refugee aid.) The controversy brings out the best and the worst in the American character: church groups and social activists rally to the Somalis' aid, while frustrated working-class whites find an easy target for their disaffection and hate groups fan the flames. The Letter takes a fascinating situation and chops it into bite-sized bits, cross-cutting interviews in mid-sentence so the substance of conflict is lost while the sense remains. In particular, the movie gives short shrift to the residents of the long-dead factory town who feel their government has abandoned them and pays more attention to foreign refugees (though if they knew the pittance this country spends on foreign aid, they'd realize they were all in the same boat). Their resentment may be misdirected — thanks in part to their own mayor, who admits he's "not a numbers guy" — but it's arguably as much a threat to the refugees' welfare as the places they've fled.

The week closes with Savi Gabizon's Nina's Tragedies (Sun., 7 p.m.), a portrait of a young voyeur whose obsession with his aunt Nina (Ayelet Zurer) makes him witness to her bereavement and rebirth. Gabizon's aggressive quirkiness can be grating, and as the young boy, Aviv Elkabeth is so passive he's practically a cipher, more a framing device than a character. Still, the well-crafted movie has its moments, and ends the series on a graceful note.

Monster Lotería (Fri., March 18, 8 p.m., $5, Space 1026, 1026 Arch St.) Small Change hosts traveling filmmakers Jim Finn and Arthur Jones for an evening of Chicagoan shorts. Finn couples video and found footage with pop music, often in Spanish, for a dichotomous effect that grows repetitious over the course of a 45-minute program, although the pairing of Leonard Nimoy's "The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins" with clips of Fidel Castro is some kind of inspired. Only some of Jones' program, which includes a pair of PowerPoint presentations, was available for preview, but Monster Team, a series of animated shorts featuring the mundane adventures of Wolfman, Caveman, Mummy, et al (they order pizza! they take phone calls!), suffers from redundancy and the sense that any Adult Swim viewer knows the punchline halfway through the joke.

Vietnam Revisited (March 16—31, County, Ambler and Bryn Mawr Theaters, www.countytheater.org) The County/Ambler/Bryn Mawr triumvirate presents screenings of A Soldier's Sweetheart, the little-seen 1998 adaptation of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried (shown on VHS) and Barbara Sonneborn's awe-inspiring documentary Regret to Inform, in which Sonneborn, whose husband was killed during the Vietnam War, travels to Vietnam and shares her grief with Vietnamese women who lost husbands on the other side of the conflict. Military film historian Martin Novelli's keynote lecture is March 23 and 24 at Bryn Mawr and Ambler, respectively.

Misc. Picks Sundance Channel fetes Claude Chabrol with three of his films and the new documentary Claude Chabrol: L'Artisan (Thu., Fri. and March 31). The Colonial runs Meet Me in St. Louis (Sat., 2 p.m.) and Spartacus (Sun., 2 p.m.), and the Jewish Film Festival reprises the snowed-out Dziga and his Brothers (Mon., 7 p.m.). Filmon Mebrahtu, whose documentaries on Philadelphia's African community are growing into an invaluable archive, unveils his latest work in progress, Circle Diaries (Mon., 7 p.m.), the story of three Sudanese teenagers who filmed their own efforts to make a new life in Philadelphia, at Penn's Logan Hall (249 S. Sixth St.). Inspired by film and returning to it, the musical Reefer Madness gets an advance screening at The Bridge (Tue., 7 p.m.).