From Distant Shores: 15 Years of
the Hubert Bals Fund
May
2–25, 2003
Since its founding in 1988, The Hubert Bals Fund
of the International Film Festival Rotterdam has given
financial support to more than 400 feature-film and documentary
projects in Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Africa,
and Latin America. The Fund was named in honor of the Rotterdam
Festival’s founding director, Hubert Bals, an indefatigable cinephile
who, before his death in 1988, helped bring Western exposure to
the cinema of countries like Tunisia and South Korea. Films completed
with grants from The Hubert Bals Fund are justly celebrated for
their visual storytelling, and many have gone on to receive prizes at major international film festivals.
In recognition of the continuing
importance of The Hubert Bals Fund in discovering
and encouraging young talent, The Museum of Modern
Art presents a tribute of approximately twenty-five films spanning
its fifteen-year history, including the New York premieres of
Ali-Reza Raissian’s The Deserted Station (Iran, 2002),
Yevgeni Yufit’s Killed by Lightning (Russia,
2002), Christian Mungiu’s
Occident (Romania, 2002), and Mani Kaul’s The
Servant’s Shirt (India, 1998). A national tour of this exhibition
is planned following its presentation at MoMA.
Organized by Joshua Siegel, Assistant Curator,
Department of Film and Media, The Museum of Modern Art,
in collaboration with Marianne Bhalotra, Coordinator
of The Hubert Bals Fund, International Film Festival Rotterdam. Made
possible with the support of The Consulate General of The Netherlands in
New York (Jeanne Wikler, General Director, Cultural Affairs). With
special thanks to Sandra den Hamer and Simon Field,
Codirectors of the International Film Festival Rotterdam;
Emile Fallaux, Boardmember of The Hubert Bals Fund;
Bianca Taal; Noah Cowan; Wampie van der Waal; and the many participating distributors, archives, and filmmakers.
. 2002.
Iran. Directed by Ali-Reza Raissian. With Leila Hatami,
Nezam Manouchehri. Based on an idea by Abbas Kiarostami.
The car of Mahtab and Mahmoud, a couple from Tehran, breaks down
near a desolate village. While Mahmoud enlists the help of a local schoolteacher
to help him repair the car, Mahtab takes over the teacher’s classroom
for a day and becomes deeply affected by the children’s
kindness and their resignation to hardship and poverty.
In Farsi with English subtitles. Courtesy Farabi Cinema Foundation, Tehran. 100 min.
. 2000. Mexico.
Directed by Maryse Sistach. With Ximena Ayala, Nancy Gutiérrez.
The unusually loving and trustful bond between two teenage
girls from a poor neighborhood in Mexico City is threatened
when one of them is brutally raped. Sistach’s fictionalized
account of this true incident is all the more harrowing
for its lack of sentimentality. In Spanish with English subtitles. Courtesy IMCINE, Mexico City. 90
min.
. 1994. China. Written and
directed by He Jianjun. With Liang Danni, Feng Yuanzheng,
Pu Quanxin. An emotionally somber yet wrenching film
about a reclusive postal worker who inherits Beijing’s
dismal“
Happiness District” route and lives vicariously through the
locals by secretly reading their mail. In Mandarin with
English subtitles. Courtesy Cowboy Pictures, New York.
102 min.
. 2002. Russia.
Directed by Yevgeni Yufit. With Aleksandr Anikeyenko,
Olga Semyonova, Vera Novikova. Yufit’s latest work,
now having its New York premiere, is a fascinating retelling of Edgar
Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Combining
science and pseudoscience, Yufit situates his story in
the subconscious of an anthropologist whose studies of
human evolution are disturbed by childhood memories of her
father’s dramatic death. In Russian with English subtitles.
Courtesy the filmmaker. 65 min.
. 1998.
India. Directed by Mani Kaul. With Pankaj Sudhir Shukla,
Anu Joseph. A lowly government clerk and his young wife
have hopes of improving their lives, but everything militates against
them—from the corrupt officials who scapegoat the clerk
to the leaky roof that affords little shelter during the
monsoon season. In Bengali with English subtitles. Courtesy
Ant Carry the Mountain Films, The Netherlands. 120 min.
.
2001. France/Senegal. Directed by Mansour Sora Wade. With Hubert
Koundé, Rokhaya Niang. “Hemmed in by fog, the fishermen
of a southern Senegalese village cannot leave the shore. A witch
doctor is summoned to cast aside such evil weather, but young Mbanik
ignores the spirits and attempts to conquer the ocean and save the
village on his own” (San Francisco International Film Festival,
2001). In Wolof with English subtitles. Courtesy California Newsreel,
San Francisco. 90 min.
. 2002. India/France. Written
and directed by Adoor Gopalakrishnan. With Oduvil Unnikrishnan,
Sukumari, Reejia. A hangman in a southern Indian village who has
spent his life carrying out politically motivated executions is
now old and so wracked with guilt that he takes to heavy drinking
and praying to the goddess Kali to forgive his sins. Gopalakrishnan
sets the film in 1941, the violent cusp of India’s independence,
pitting Gandhian principles against the harsher traditions of punishment
and retribution. In Malayalam with English subtitles. Introduced
by the director. 90 min.
.
1994. Tunisia/France. Directed by Moufida Tlatli. With
Amel Hedhili, Hend Sabri. Straddling the repressive years
between Tunisia’s dying monarchy and its fledgling independence
in the 1950s, Tlatli’s incisive debut film takes
as its protagonist the illegitimate daughter of a servant
and her royal master. Now bearing a child of her own, she
returns to the run-down palace she had fled as a girl. In Arabic
with English subtitles. Courtesy Mongrel Media, Toronto. 128 min.
. 1991. China.
Directed by Chen Kaige. With Liu Zhongyuan, Huang Lei.
Making spectacular use of the wide screen, Kaige’s
parable of two blind musicians in northwest China, a dying master and
his libidinous pupil, heralded the sort of visually arresting and
obliquely political films for which the so-called Fifth
Generation of Chinese directors would become famous. In
Mandarin with English subtitles. Courtesy Kino International,
New York. 120 min.
. 2002. Mauritania/France.
Written and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. With Khatra Ould Abder
Kader, Maata Ould Mohamed Abeid. With dreams of emigrating to Europe,
seventeen-year-old Abdallah visits his mother one last time in a
small town on the West African coast. He discovers that he has become
a stranger in his homeland, but over time the beauty and folly of
the villagers’ lives awaken feelings of tenderness, hope,
and nostalgia. In French with English subtitles. Courtesy New Yorker
Films. 96 min.
. 1997. Tunisia. Written and
directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. An elegiac look at a disappearing
world: the traditional male culture of the Mahgreb. In Arabic with
English subtitles. Courtesy California Newsreel, San Francisco.
26 min.
. 1999. Senegal/ France/Switzerland/Germany.
Written and directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty. With Lissa
Balera, Tayerou M’Baye. A hymn to the courage and ingenuity
of street children, Mambéty’s last film follows a twelve-year-old
paraplegic girl who successfully muscles in on a boy’s world—the
selling of newspapers. In French and Wolof with English subtitles.
45 min.
. 1994. Senegal. Directed
by Moussa Sene Absa. With Circé Lethem, Jöelle Marlier,
Julien Rassam. A local bus driver has a series of ill-fated, gently
ironic encounters with his passengers. In French with English subtitles.
Courtesy INA, Paris. 45 min.
Total running time 116 min.
Note: The short film Yalla yaana will
not be shown in the Three Shorts from Africa program. We
apologize for the change.
. 1994.
Algeria/France/Germany/Switzerland. Written and directed
by Merzak Allouache. With Nadia Kaci, Mohamed Ourdache. Allouache’s
gripping story of Islamic extremism is set in Algiers soon after
the bloody riots of October 1988. A young baker in the working-class
district of Bab El-Oued, driven mad by the fundamentalist propaganda
broadcast day and night from rooftop loudspeakers, tosses one of
the loudspeakers into the sea. In Arabic with English subtitles.
Courtesy Arab Film Distribution, Seattle. 93 min.
. 2000. Kazakhstan. Written
and directed by Serik Aprymov. With Kasym Zhakibayev,
Shakir Vilyoumov. Bored by the hot summer days, three
young brothers living in a village in Kazakhstan befriend a concentration
camp survivor who looks after steam locomotives at a local military base.
Transfixed by his tales of faraway places, they go in search of a lake
where army officers are said to cavort with prostitutes. In Russian
with English subtitles. Courtesy the filmmaker. 80 min.
. 1998. Egypt. Written
and directed by Radwan El-Kashef. With Sherihan, Hamdy
Ahmed. A village is abandoned by its able men for the
bounty of the Gulf region, leaving the women behind to dissolve rigid
patriarchal traditions. In Arabic with English subtitles. Courtesy
Arab Film Distribution, Seattle. 110 min.
. 2000. India. Directed by
Buddhadeb Dasgupta. With Jaya Seal, Tapas Pal. Dasgupta’s
bold critique of religious fundamentalism in India parallels the
growing tension between a Christian missionary and outside Hindu
extremists with the rivalry between two railway workers whose playful
wrestling matches turn aggressive after one of them marries a local
girl. In Bengali with English subtitles. Courtesy the filmmaker.
99 min.
.
1999. Turkey/The Netherlands/Germany. Written and directed
by Yesim Ustaoglu. With Nazmi Qirix, Newroz Baz. A young
man newly arrived in Istanbul from western Turkey befriends a Kurd
from the east who turns out to be part of the Kurdish rebel underground. The
director takes her characters on a journey out of Istanbul into
a ravishing and war-ravaged landscape close to the Iraqi
border. In Turkish and Kurdish with English subtitles.
Courtesy the filmmaker and Cinema Village, New York. 104 min.
. 1992. Georgia/The
Netherlands. Directed by Tato Kotetishvili, Ineke Smits.
An absurdist vignette about a Dutch reporter who gets
stuck in the former Soviet republic of Georgia. In Georgian, German, and
Dutch with English subtitles. Courtesy The Netherlands Filmmuseum Distribution.
20 min.
. 1998. Georgia/The Netherlands. Directed by Tato
Kotetishvili, Ineke Smits. After a long stay in The Netherlands,
Kotetishvili returned in 1997 to his native Georgia, where
civil war had been raging for ten years. There, while
videotaping his own wedding, he interviewed family and friends about how
the war had changed their lives. Kotetishvili unexpectedly died before he
could edit the footage, and so his partner, Smits, completed the
film. In Georgian with English subtitles. Courtesy Lumen
Film, The Netherlands. 58 min.
. 1999. Mali. Directed
by Cheick Oumar Sissoko. With Sotigui Kouyaté, Salif Keita.
Genesis transplants the Old Testament tale of warring clans to the
desert plateaus of northeastern Mali. With his epic imagery, rigorous
reading of Biblical scripture, and blend of traditional and modern
African music and dress, Sissoko conjures a strikingly original
reworking of the ancient genocidal conflict over religion, land,
and birthright. In Bambara with English subtitles. 102 min. Courtesy
Kino International, New York, and California Newsreel, San Francisco.
. 2000. China/Germany.
Written and directed by Lou Ye. With Zhou Xun, Jia Hongsheng.
Lou gives the Shanghai river district a squalid, neon-drenched
glamour and noirish unease. Making clever allusion to
Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and the films of Jean Vigo and
Wong Kar-Wai, Lou spins an intricate tale from the perspective
of an unseen, unreliable narrator. In Mandarin with English
subtitles. Courtesy Strand Releasing, Los Angeles. 83
min.
.
2002. Iran. Directed by Dariush Mehrjui. With Neda Aghaei, Masoumeh
Bakhshi. With its unflinching depictions of forced marriage, self
immolation, and even decapitation, Bemani pulls no punches in decrying
the brutal treatment of women in traditional Iran. But Mehrjui,
one of the key figures of the New Iranian Cinema, is rather more
interested in portraying the revolution quietly taking place among
today’s younger generation of women, who refuse to allow poverty
or patriarchy to destroy their lives. The Bemani screenings
are in association with The Human Rights Watch International Film
Festival, which runs in June at Lincoln Center. In Farsi with English
subtitles. Courtesy Farabi Cinema Foundation, Tehran. 97 min.
.
1996. Palestine/Israel. Written and directed by Elia Suleiman. With
Suleiman, Ola Tabari, Nazira Suleiman, and Fuad Suleiman. After
living in New York for many years, Suleiman returned to Israel to
make his debut feature, a tragicomic sketchbook of quotidian life
among the Palestinian middle class, casting his own extended circle
of family and friends as its central characters. In Arabic, French,
and Hebrew with English subtitles. Courtesy Wellspring, New York.
85 min.
.
2002. Mexico/Spain. Written and directed by Carlos Reygadas. With
Alejandro Ferretis, Magdalena Flores. “Japón
represents an impressive introduction for Reygadas. Spreading a
weighty canvas of big themes [...] this slow-burning, almost actionless
epic about a suicidal man saved by his encounter with an unsophisticated
old woman makes considerable demands on its audience. But its powerfully
visual storytelling delivers great rewards” (David Rooney,
Variety). In Spanish with English subtitles. Courtesy Vitagraph,
Los Angeles. 122 min.
. 1999. Argentina.
Written and directed by Pablo Trapero. With Luis Margani,
Daniel Valenzuela. Trapero brings humor, sympathy, and
neorealist grit to this depiction of working-class life in contemporary Argentina.
The film’s hapless yet indefatigable hero is a divorced
day laborer who takes whatever jobs come his way, from
operating a crane in Buenos Aires despite his fear of
heights to traveling 1000 miles south to Patagonia to
run an excavating machine. In Spanish with English subtitles. 92
min.
.
1990. Peru. Directed by Francisco Lombardi. With Alberto
Benavides, Elide Brero. A wickedly satirical portrait of three
generations of Peruvians from three different social classes: an
elderly couple, once wealthy landowners, who are obsessed
with turning their deaths into a grand social revenge;
a radio personality who discovers he is a fraud when
he tries to save a suicidal woman; and an ex-servant who, driven
by the need to feed herself and her grandchildren, becomes
fixated on a gift pig. In Spanish with English subtitles. Courtesy Tournesol, Madrid.
120 min.
. 2002. Romania. Written and directed by
Christian Mungiu. With Alexandru Papadopol, Dorel Visan,
Tania Popa. A black comedy about three lives that intersect:
Sorina ditches her fiancé Luci for a
Frenchman, whom she believes is her ticket out of Romania;
Luci takes a job to win her back, but along the way meets
Mihaela, who was jilted at the altar and now works as a
giant foam telephone. In Romanian with English subtitles. Courtesy
the filmmaker and the National Film Center, Bucharest. 100 min.
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