Saturday, October 28

Foreigners Within

Saturday, 10:00AM, Vinegar Hill

Mr. Ahmed

Mr. Ahmed lives in self-exile in Pennsylvania and runs a shop full of kitschy knicknacks from India. Portrayed by renowned Indian actor Naseeruddin Shah, Mr. Ahmed is a displaced person, caught between two cultures and belonging to neither. Although Mr. Ahmed has lived in the United States for 15 years, he still is haunted by his unresolved feelings for India, news of which he obtains through listening to the radio. "India is not a rational country," says Mr. Ahmed. Yet Mr. Ahmed "does not fit into his adopted homeland, and he certainly does not fit into his birthland," says director Terrance Grace. The death of his mother is the catalyst that sends Mr. Ahmed back to India.

Mr. Ahmed is a beautifully filmed story by Emmy award-winning cinematographer Nick Hutak that The Times of India calls "an enigmatic masterpiece."

Seeing

Three European tourists make a day trip to Ellis Island to experience how immigrants were welcomed to America. An encounter with a black stranger forever changes the balance of their relationships. Filmed in 16 mm black and white, in guerilla filmmaking style, The Ellis Island ferry and the Ellis Island Museum evoke the atmosphere of the early 20th century when European immigration reached its zenith.

Saturday, 10:00AM, Culbreth

Saboteur

Foreigners within were a very real concern at the time Alfred Hitchcock made Saboteur. Although it was released in early 1942, production began before Pearl Harbor at a time when America was officially neutral. As in Foreign Correspondent (1940), Hitchcock intended to influence American opinion against Nazi Germany and the pro-German element in America called America Firsters.

Robert Cummings stars as a worker in a munitions plant who is falsely accused of starting a deadly fire in the plant. On the run from the police, he searches for the real saboteurs in a chase that takes him across country. En route, he meets Priscilla Lane, who ultimately helps him in his quest to prove his innocence and prevent the ring of saboteurs from striking again. The chase takes him past Boulder Dam, through Radio City Music Hall, where Hitchcock's films usually played in New York, and climaxes at the top of the Statue of Liberty.

Saboteur contains typical Hitchcock touches, such as his fondness for monuments and historical sites. The Statue of Liberty scene is a forerunner of the Mount Rushmore scene in North by Northwest, only by then, Hitchcock had learned an important lesson from Saboteur. As he told Francois Truffaut, "there's a serious error in this scene. If we'd had the hero instead of the villain hanging in mid-air, the audience's anguish would have been much greater."

Discussion: Enemies Within and WWII
David Paletz, Professor of Political Science, Duke University
Randy Stith, Associate Director of University Relations for Visual Communications, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Saturday, 10:00AM, County Office Building

The Manchurian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate begins during the Korean War. An American infantry platoon led by Frank Sinatra is captured by the North Koreans. Later, the men are released and Laurence Harvey receives a Congressional Medal of Honor. Thanks to Communist brainwashing, Harvey is also a timebomb programmed to kill, with no remorse or memory of his actions. Even more shocking, Harvey's Communist handler is revealed to be his own mother, Angela Lansbury. Murder she wrote, indeed. Director John Frankenheimer wanted to satirize the witch-hunting of the McCarthy era, and The Manchurian Candidate was one of the first movies to take on the era when fevered patriots imagined a Communist lurking under every bush. Reportedly, he was delighted when both the American Legion and the American Communist Party complained about the film.

Many critics said The Manchurian Candidate was as suspenseful as Hitchcock. Kim Newman goes further and credits Frankenheimer with creating a new subgenre: the political thriller. Up until The Manchurian Candidate, the political thriller had been an offshoot of the gangster movie, in which politicians were crooked for the money. According to Newman, by incorporating satire, suspense, science fiction, surrealism, horror and romantic comedy, Frankenheimer ventured into a new realm.

Discussion: The Yellow Perils Meets the Communist Threat
Gina Marchetti, Associate Professor of Film, University of Maryland, and author of Romance and the "Yellow Peril"

Mark Lupher, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia

Saturday, 12:00PM, Vinegar Hill

A.K.A. Don Bonus

Sokly Ny was an 18-year-old Cambodian refugee attending high school in San Francisco. His family had come to the United States in 1982 when he was seven. He'd changed his name to Don Bonus at 14 because he thought Don sounded macho and Bonus was on a bonus pack of gum. By his senior year in high school, his grades and his family life were in trouble. Then he met filmmaker Spencer Nakasako, who handed him a video camera and changed his life. Bonus' videotape becomes both a personal diary for him and a record of the struggles facing all Southeast Asian immigrants in America. The video begins with Bonus telling of his family's escape from the Khmer Rouge in the Cambodian jungle. His father did not make it, sacrificing himself as a decoy so that his family could get away. Bonus' mother has remarried to a stepfather her children despise. His younger brother is detained in the Youth Center, and the family is forced to move to a studio apartment in the Tenderloin, a San Francisco neighborhood favored by prostitutes and junkies. Even the police can't be counted on to respond when the family's apartment is broken into. The result of that year with a video camera was a 55-minute documentary that won the best documentary award at the San Francisco International Film Festival, and whose off-hand poetry and insight are garnering acclaim at screenings around the world.

Saturday, 2:00PM, Vinegar Hill

Drawn from Memory

Director Paul Fierlinger's life story is so extraordinary that for years people told him he should write a book. "Well of course, since I don't write," says Fierlinger, the animator who created the Teeny Little Superguy on Sesame Street, "I realized that I could only tell my story through my art-which is animation." Fierlinger, the son of a Czech diplomat, was born in Japan. The Fierlingers were on their home back to Czechoslovakia when they learned that Hitler had invaded their country. Fierlinger spent World War II in America in a series of foster homes. After the war, his family returned to Czechoslovakia and, speaking only Japanese and English, Fierlinger entered a prestigious Czech school. Although his classmates included Milos Forman and Czech president Vaclav Havel, Fierlinger became the quintessential foreigner within. He dreamed of an idyllic America and resented his privileged life as the son of a member of Czechoslovakia's ruling Communist elite. In 1967, before Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, he made a daring escape.

More than a tale of world events shaping one's childhood, Fierlinger seeks to come to terms with his parents-particularly his father-who abandoned him first with foster families and then to boarding school. The film's epigraph comes from Oscar Wilde: "Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them." "Rendered in pen-and-ink drawings as whimsical as James Thurber and words as piercing as those of Milan Kundera...," says The Philadelphia Inquirer, Drawn from Memory "...uses the lighthearted medium of animation to heartbreaking effect."

Saturday, 1:00PM, Culbreth

Canadian Bacon

Canada may appear to be our peace-loving neighbor, but in Michael Moore's new post-Cold War satire, a threat lurks north of the border. After all, what do Americans really know about Canada? Alan Alda stars as the liberal President of the United States, who desperately needs an enemy to replace the Soviet Union. More mindful of opinion polls than the opportunities presented by peace, Alda and his minions turn Canada in the new "Evil Empire."

In Niagara Falls, N.Y., munitions manufacturer Hacker Industries (motto: "Peace Through Fear...Since 1947") is feeling the economic downside of peace, and still hopes to sell the government the ultimate doomsday machine. Rip Torn evokes memories of Dr. Strangelove as he portrays a general who concocts skirmishes along the border. With John Candy as the patriotic Niagara Falls sheriff, tensions along the border are certain to escalate.

Michael Moore infused humor into documentary with his 1989 film Roger and Me. He's done the same to the ubiquitous television news magazine with his series TV Nation, shown first on NBC and then on Fox. The Gulf War inspired Moore's first feature film. "We as an American people will accept what our government tells us," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "If the government says 'go to war,' we go to war...against a country we know nothing about. I thought what would be the most absurd example of this and came up with Canada." David Brown, the noted producer of Jaws, A Few Good Men, The Player, and Canadian Bacon, will accompany Michael Moore at this screening.

Saturday, 1:00PM, County Office Building

Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

At the height of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick released the funniest movie ever made about nuclear annihilation. Reaction, at least for The New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, was mixed. On the one hand, he called it "the most shattering sick joke I've ever come across." On the other, it's "one of the cleverest and most incisive satiric thrusts at the awkwardness and folly of the military that has ever been on the screen."

Peter Sellers plays not only the title character, a German scientist whose mechanical arm spontaneously salutes Hitler, but also Muffley, the President of the United States and RAF Group Captian Lionel Mandrake, the most sane character in the movie (Sellers is "U.S. and Them" rolled into one). Sterling Hayden is General Jack D. Ripper, a right-wing fanatic who suspects Communists of fluoridating the water to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." George C. Scott as General "Buck" Turgidson argues that bombing Russia isn't such a bad idea. As far as Soviet retaliation, he says, "Mr. President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed, but I do say not more than ten or twenty million killed tops, depending on the breaks."

Kubrick originally intended the film to be a serious adaptation of Peter George's Red Alert. Fail Safe, a 1964 drama with a similar plot, and Dr. Strangelove provoked much debate about the likelihood of accidental nuclear war, and the makers of these films were called anti-American.

Discussion: Film, Politics, and Paranoia
Robert Kolker, Professor of English, University of Maryland, and author of The Altering Eye and many other books and articles on film.
Michael Smith, Associate Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs, University of Virginia

Saturday, 4:00PM, Vinegar Hill

The Young One

You'd think that a film by the great Spanish director Luis Bunuel about American racism and the Lolita syndrome-made at the time the civil rights movement was heating up and Nabakov's book was on the bestseller list-would have been a sure-fire success. That was not the case. The Virginia Festival of American Film is pleased to present a rarely seen and under-appreciated work on these most American of themes by one of the legends of filmmaking. Bunuel turns Acapulco, where the film was shot, into an island wild-game preserve off the coast of South Carolina. The island is occupied by Zachary Scott, the unsavory game warden, and Key Meersman, a 13-year-old girl whose grandfather has just died and whose pubescent form is very much attracting the interest of Scott. Into this scene arrives Bernie Hamilton, a hip-talking black jazz musician and Yankee who's escaped a lynching after being falsely accused of raping a white woman. Bunuel refused to condemn or exonerate anyone. Much like the natural world found on the island, where predators are a fact of life, Bunuel merely shows his characters in their environment, without making judgment on their behavior. He's called it one of his most personal projects, and The Young One has been described as " one of the most pungent films about the American South ever made."

Moderator: Paul Gaston, Professor of History, University of Virginia.

Saturday, 4:00PM, Culbreth

The Italian

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Images of Immigrant Life from the Turn of the Century

At the turn of the century, Italian immigrants were in the same position Irish immigrants had been a half century earlier: at the bottom of the heap. Early movies about Italian Americans perpetrated the usual ethnic stereotypes and were invariably about crime.

The Italian is the best of all the surviving immigrant pictures by far, according to Kevin Brownlow in Behind the Mask of Innocence. It's a notable early film of producer Thomas H. Ince, significant for its realistic portrayal of what life was like for immigrants living in New York slums in the early 1900s. Francis Ford Coppola used The Italian as a guide in recreating turn-of-the-century New York for The Godfather, Part II.

George Beban, a well-known stage actor of the time, was brilliant in the role of an Italian immigrant, whose child's death can be attributed to the indifference of a ward boss. Upon his release from prison, Beban finds himself in a position to cause the death of the politician's child. It is only the memory of his own child that prevents him from doing away with another. Also on the program will be images drawn from the Library of Congress' paper print collection, depicting immigrant life at the turn of the century. Among the films to be shown will be Emigrants Landing at Ellis Island.

Saturday, 4:00PM, County Office Building

Surname Viet Given Name Nam

 with director Trinh T. Minh-ha

Trinh T. Minh-ha's profoundly personal documentary explores the role of Vietnamese women historically and in contemporary society. Using dance, printed texts, folk poetry and the words and experiences of Vietnamese women in Vietnam and the United States, Trinh's film challenges official culture with the voices of women. A theoretically and formally complex work, Surname Viet Given Name Nam explores the difficulty of translation, and themes of dislocation and exile, critiquing both traditional society and life since the war. A native of Vietnam herself, Trinh emigrated to the United States in 1970 and was educated here and Paris, before beginning the travels to Senegal and West Africa critically documented in her acclaimed "ethnographic" films, Reassemblage and Naked Spaces: Living is Round. Surname Viet Given Name Nam gave Trinh the opportunity to explore her own cultural backgrounds. According to critic Stuart Klawans, "With this film, Trinh begins to construct a global consciousness based explicitly on the conditions of being an exile, a woman and an inheritor of Vietnamese culture."

Moderator: Susan McKinnon, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Virginia.

Saturday, 7:00PM, Vinegar Hill

Ballot Measure 9

 with guest speaker Anna Marie Smith (Department of Government, Cornell University)

Heather MacDonald's documentary about Oregon's 1992 Ballot Measure 9, which prohibited and revoked laws that protect homosexuals from discrimination, is a chilling account of the politics of hate. According to Variety, "Although the results are known, this important account also works effectively as a suspenseful tale, one that goes beyond gay rights to encompass such timely and broader issues as human rights, cultural diversity and the American political system." MacDonald follows the different factions surrounding the Ballot Measure 9 campaign as it heats up over the course of eight months. As the rhetoric becomes more inflamed, anti-gay violence in Portland in 1992 surpasses that found in Chicago, New York or San Francisco. The measure was sponsored by the Oregon Citizen's Alliance, a group espousing family values and led by Lon Mabon, who calls the fight "a simple battle between good and evil." The Citizen's Alliance attempted to establish a link between homosexuality and pedophilia, labeled homosexuals abnormal and perverse, and insisted that teachers define homosexuality in a denigrating way. Although Ballot Measure 9 was ultimately defeated by a 57 percent to 43 percent margin, the tactics of the Citizen's Alliance have provided a blueprint for other anti-gay ballot measures. Since the 1992 election, similar measures have passed in Colorado and Cincinnati, as well as in other Oregon communities.

Speaker Anna Marie Smith is author of Race and Discourse in Contemporary Britain.

Saturday, 7:00PM, Culbreth Theater

White Man's Burden

 featuring a discussion with Julian Bond, Deborah McDowell, and Paul Gaston

Louis Pinnock (John Travolta) is a factory worker with a history of company loyalty. He's up for the foreman's job and looks forward to making a better life for his wife and children-until his world collides with that of Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte). Thaddeus was born into wealth and privilege in a black man's world, and life has never disappointed him. A businessman with a flair for fine living, he has a magnificent home and a beautiful family. It is when their paths cross that Pinnock, in a single unguarded moment, oversteps the invisible barrier that keeps a struggling white man from getting his due. The incident costs him everything: livelihood, home, family. The desperate course of action he pursues changes the lives of everyone he touches-especially that of Thaddeus Thomas. Desmond Nakano, screenwriter of American Me and Last Exit to Brooklyn, makes his directorial debut with this surprising tale of reversed race relations. Intending to make black and white audiences question their assumptions about race, Nakano's film is rooted in his own experiences of role reversal as a young Japanese-American, playing a game of war with his older brother "I remember my brother running past me and yelling: 'Kill 'em! Kill 'em! Kill the Japs!'" he recalled. "It was like everything stopped for me. I looked at him and realized, 'We're Japanese to white people but we're both American.' The line between us and them was suddenly reversed. And when your own brother says, in effect: 'Kill us! Kill us!' that's a real moral dilemma and that's what this movie is all about."

Saturday, 7:00PM, County Office Building

Premiere!

Scorpion Spring

Equal parts neo-noir thriller, contemporary western, and road movie, Scorpion Spring is set in the remote Anz-Borrego desert along the California-Mexico border. The film unfolds agains the controversial social backdrop of illegal Mexican immigration and its attendant violence, official corruption, and drug and human trafficking. The story follows the fate of a young American who, while en route from New York to L.A., is robbed of everything but his convertible, and then joins up with a debauched French actor who's just been dumped by his girlfriend. They decide to pool their resources to get to L.A., but instead are drawn into a dangerous adventure when they unwittingly pick up two Mexicans who are mysteriously involved in a a drug smuggling operation centered in Scorpion Spring. The miscommunication between the Spanish and English-speakers, and the unclear motivations of the passengers and law enforcement officers who cross the Americans' path, produce a rich cross-cultural mystery with strong political overtones.

Saturday, 7:00PM, McCleod Auditorium

The United States of Poetry

The United States of Poetry brings about a most unusual union: that of poetry and television. Washington Square Films produced this five-part series for television and features more than 60 American poets (or their fans) reading their works. Two of the series' five episodes are being made available to the Festival as a special preview from the Independent Television Service, the organization whose Congressional mandate is to enliven public television with American independent productions.

An eye-popping montage of people, ideas, words, accents, rhythms and images set to original music by tomandandy, The United States of Poetry creates a new kind of word-meets-image: poetry as television, television as poetry. Among the voices bringing poetry to life are Charlottesvillian/poet laureate Rita Dove, Beat icons Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Amiri Baraka, Nobel winners Joseph Brodsky and Derek Walcott, rockers Lou Reed and Leonard Cohen, Jack Kerouac-enthusiast Johnny Depp and former President Jimmy Carter.

And then there are the newer voices from around the country: Indian cowboy poet Henry RealBird, Appalachian poet laureate James Still, Tlinglit poet Nora Marks Dauenhauere of Juneau, and Pidgen poet Lois-Ann Yamanka from Honolulu. Walt Whitman heard America singing. So does The United States of Poetry.

Saturday, 10:00PM, Vinegar Hill

Once Upon a Time in the West

Sergio Leone, the director who invented the spaghetti western, created his cinematic masterpiece with Once Upon a Time in the West. In a brilliant bit of casting against type, Leone had the all-American Henry Fonda play a killer so cold-blooded he'd shoot a child. Fonda has lived his life as a gunslinger, and now he's ready to become a businessman and profit from the coming railroad-using his gunslinging skills. Claudia Cardinale, widowed by Fonda, refuses to give up her land in its prime location with its essential water. Charles Bronson is the man with no name seeking to avenge a crime Fonda has long forgotten. Jason Robards, a good-natured outlaw, is eager to help Cardinale. Leone grew up watching American Westerns from the Thirties that were often poorly dubbed, creating a distance between the sound and image of the movie that capitivated him. He capitalized on that distance in his own films. Vincent Canby notes that "the Leone Westerns are twice removed from reality, being based on myths that were originally conceived in Hollywood studios in the nineteen-thirties."

Four distinct themes identify each of the main characters in Enrico Morricone's score: tuneless harmonica for Bronson, biting electric guitar for Fonda, humorous banjo for Robards and a lush, romantic score for Cardinale. Morricone composed the score from the script before any of it was shot. Leone loved it so much that he played it on the set so the actors could adapt their body rhythms to their individual themes.

Discussion: The Italian Spaghetti Western

Saturday, 10:00PM, Culbreth

Frankie Starlight

As a result of his newly-found literary fame in his country, an Irish dwarf named Frankie Starlight living in England embarks on a journey of self discovery. He is forced to face the facts about his birth (that he was conceived by any one of a number of sailors who helped sneak his French mother aboard a ship from Ireland to England), the true identity of his father (who may or may not be a simple Midwesterner from America), and his unfulfilled desire to have sex with a woman. Gabriel Byrne is the Irish customs officer who rescues Frankie's mother Bernadette (Anne Parillaud), and Matt Dillon plays the American lover with whom she ends up in Texas. Shot on location in Dublin, France, and Texas, the film is a true U.S. and Them epic which is lovely to behold.

Saturday, 10:00PM, County Office Building

The Taming Power of the Small

 with guest actors Treat Williams and David Morse, director Wayne Powers, and producer Mark Johnson

The Taming Power of the Small is about two men who, after a kidnapping gone awry, must decide the fate of a nine year old boy. The Americans' view of the I Ching, the Chinese book of philosophy, plays the key role in their decision. The film's co-writer and director, Wayne Powers, and its co-writer and producer, Donna Powers, live in Keswick, Virginia. They are currently writing a feature for Steven Speilberg. The film's executive producer is UVA alumnus Mark Johnson.

Hair

Milos Forman made this exhilarating vision of American society during the Sixties, a period when, according to immigrant writer Andrei Codrescu, "Young people had become outsiders to America's mainstream ... in voluntary exile." The story, which the film grafted onto the glorious music from the original Broadway musical, begins with the arrival of a young Midwestern farmboy (John Savage) in New York. There, he is ushered by a charismatic hippie, Berger (Treat Williams), and his band of Central Park acidheads into the Age of Aquarius. The boy's awakening, however, is cut short by his induction into the Vietnam War. Critic Roger Ebert marveled at the time at immigrant director Forman's "uncanny feeling for the textures of American life ... more remarkable when you reflect than when Hair first occupied a stage, the Russians were in the process of occupying Forman's native Czechoslovakia, and he was in the process of becoming a filmmaker without a country."