Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Pictures are happy to be taking part in the 2008 Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) (March 31-April 6) in collaborative partnership with Ithaca College. FLEFF is a one week multimedia interarts extravaganza that reboots the environment and sustainability into a larger global conversation, embracing issues ranging from labor, war, health, disease, music, intellectual property, fine art, software, remix culture, economics, archives, AIDS, women's rights and human rights. Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Pictures will present 17 feature films and documentaries during the FLEFF weekend of April 4-6. FOR SHOWTIMES FOR EACH FILM, SEE CINEMAPOLIS HOME PAGE. SHOWTIMES WITH PANELS/SPEAKERS ARE LISTED WITH EACH INDIVIDUAL WRITE-UPS BELOW. FOR A SCHEDULING GRID FOR THE WEEKEND, GO TO ithaca.edu/fleff, CLICK ON SCHEDULE OF EVENTS AND THEN DOWNTOWN FILMS Alphabetical List: 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS, 2 DAYS CARAMEL CHOP SHOP THE COUNTERFEITERS (Oscar winner--Best Foreign Film) GRASS (Silent film with live original music)Advance ticket are on sale at theaters now HONEYDRIPPER IT (Silent film with live original music)Advance tickets on sale at theaters now THE LAST CONQUISTADOR MAN PUSH CART THE PRICE OF SUGAR SCOUTS ARE CANCELLED STEAMBOAT BILL, JR. (Silent film with live original music) Advance tickets are on sale at theaters now STEEP SUMMER PALACE TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE (Oscar Winner--Best Documentary) TERROR'S ADVOCATE WAR/DANCE 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS and 2 DAYS (Cristian Mungiu, Romania, 2007, 113 min) Cinemapolis, starts Friday April 4 and continuing Fri 7:00 pm with moderator Luke Fenchel, Julie Teter and Pat Flery (Planned Parenthood), Jud Kilgore, Doctor; and Brett Thompson, Elmira College; Sat. 2 pm with David Ost, author of The Defeat of Solidarity: Anger and Politics in Postcommunist Europe, and Adriana Chira, anthropology, Cornell ; and Sun. April 6 2:00 with Kati Lustyik, TVR, IC . 4 Months also plays Fri, Sat, and Sun at 9:30 "4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days" is a harrowing odyssey about an illegal abortion and yet, moment by moment, it's bursting with life. Set in small-town Romania in 1987 under the waning but still tyrannical Ceauşescu regime, it depicts 24 hours in the lives of two college girls – the pregnant Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) and her fiercely loyal roommate, Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) – as they attempt to elude the authorities. On its simplest level, the movie is a straightforward chronicle of the events leading up to the abortion, and its immediate consequences. But it is so much more than that. Cristian Mungiu, the writer-director, making only his second feature, opens up an entire society for us. It may seem perverse to contend that a movie with such a harrowing subject is nevertheless revivifying. But the New Wave of Romanian cinema is the most exciting in the world right now. 4 MONTHS, 3 WEEKS and 2 DAYS is its latest masterpiece." (Peter Rainer, CSM) (4 MONTHS won the Golden Palm at Cannes; European Film Awards' Best Film, Director, Actress and Screenplay; and was chosen Best Foreign Film by the Golden Globes, Independent Spirits and most major international critics' organizations. CARAMEL (Nadine Labaki,Lebanon, 2007, 95 PG) Cinemapolis Sat. April 5 at 7:00 with Deborah Starr, author of Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt, & Sunday April 6 at 7:00 with Caetlin Benson Allott, Cinema Studies, IC "This is a Lebanese slice-of-life-in-a-Beirut-beauty-shop movie starring and directed by the stunningly beautiful and charismatic Nadine Labaki, who is going to be a major international star one of these days. Everything about these characters, the city and their circumstances manages to be authentic. In true chick flick fashion, the plot comes and goes. The real point is the dilemmas faced by each of the women: one is a closeted lesbian, struggling with her feelings in a society that disapproves, to say the least; one is getting married, but has to deal with her fiancé’s expectation that she’s a virgin (needless to say, she’s not); one is 65 and being romanced by a preternaturally suave man of a certain age, but has to balance the potential romance with taking care of her crazy mother; and one is coming to terms with her own aging process. Some of this works out for the characters; some of it doesn’t. Joanna Moukarzel is unusually subtle and thoughtful as Rima, who is obviously attracted to women, and who has a wedding scene so utterly different from anything you’d see in a western movie that it comes as a revelation. Sihame Haddad breaks your heart as Rose, juggling perhaps her last shot at romance. But while the fates of the characters waver, two things don’t: the writing stays honest throughout, and Labaki steals every scene she’s in [though she] gives away most of the meatiest dramatic scenes. She simply has that special, indefinable thing that only a few actors in any particular generation have. CARAMEL will likely be the Lebanese selection for Academy Award for 'Best Foreign Film' [but it]deserves to be in the categories with the big boys, and whoever wins for Best Actress will be the second most deserving actress of 2007." (Jeff Beresford-Howe, Film Threat) CHOP SHOP (Ramin Bahrani,USA, 2008, 84 min.) Fall Creek, Saturday April 5, 7:00 pm with director Ramin Bahrani We are happy to announce that 32-year old director Ramin Bahrani will be present at the festival to introduce CHOP SHOP (and MAN PUSH CART) and conduct Q&A after the films. "Sometimes you find an independent film that is miraculous. Such a film is CHOP SHOP by Ramin Bahrani, the Iran-born American director whose 'Man Push Cart' made such a stir three years ago. CHOP SHOP is another film about making a hard living in New York City, and with more time to film and stunning performances by his very young actors, Bahrani has made an even more powerful film. It is set in Willet’s Point, Queens, and stars a 12-year-old boy named Alejandro Polanco and a 16-year-old girl named Isamar Gonzales, playing a brother and sister who share a tiny room above an auto repair shop. Alejandro hustles customers for his boss’s shop, learns the auto repair trade, peddles M&Ms on the subway, does some hubcap-stealing and purse-snatching, and dreams that he and his sister will own their own taco and beans truck. He and Isamar, both from Puerto Rico, spontaneously, joyously like each other, and one of the movie’s scenes of heartbreaking reality shows them at horseplay—just a couple of kids, in a world of unremitting poverty. Bahrani’s camera lives in their lives. There is no false sentiment in his story, just a fascination with these characters. The area is across the expressway from Shea Stadium and in the LaGuardia flight path, but seems to be in another world than the United States. And yet the ingenuity and improvisation of this brother and sister forces the Iron Triangle to support them, sometimes by any means necessary. Now we have an American film with the raw power of “City of God” or “Pixote,” a film that does something unexpected, and inspired, and brave." (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times) THE COUNTERFEITERS (Stefan Ruzowitzky, Austria, 2007, 98 R) Fall Creek; starts Friday April 4 and continuing Fri. April 4, 7:00 with Leah Shafer, film studies, Hobart and william Smith, and Michael Richardson, German, IC; Sat. Apr. 5, 2:00 With Matt Fee, cinema studies, IC, and Roger Hallas, editor of The Witness and the Image, Syracuse U; Sun. April 6 2:00 pm with Sabine Haenni, author of The Immigrant Scene and Paul Flagg, German Studies, Cornell. THE COUNTERFEITERS also plays Sat. 4/5 and Sun. 4/6 at 9:30, and Mon-Thurs 7:15/ 9:35 Oscar-winner, Best Foreign Film "Who is the greater hero: the morally intransigent man who refuses all compromise with evil, or the trimmer who partly collaborates with an oppressor in the hope of keeping himself and others alive? THE COUNTERFEITERS, makes the old quandaries vibrantly new. This emotionally commanding movie (winner of the Best Foreign Film Oscar), celebrates two real-life figures of very different temperament. The central character is based on Salomon Smolianoff—known in the movie as Sally (Karl Markovics)—the most talented counterfeiter in prewar Berlin, and also a bon vivant, ladies’ man, cynic, and opportunist; in brief, a happy criminal. In the film, Sally, a Russian-born Jew, is arrested and placed at the head of Operation Bernhard—a counterfeiting workshop run by the S.S. and staffed by Jewish prisoners skilled as printers and graphic artists. The Nazi plan is to produce enormous amounts of authentic-looking British and American currency to undermine the economies of those countries. Sally’s perfect design for the dollar is sabotaged by a Communist printer in the group, Adolf Burger (August Diehl), a fiery anti-Nazi who can’t bring himself to help the German war effort. THE COUNTERFEITERS is devoted to Sally’s gift for survival—his way of using his wits to keep the group together and to prevent Burger from attaining the martyrdom he appears to long for. THE COUNTERFEITERS is a testament to guile. Director Ruzowitzky scored the picture with tangos, and the tangos are meant to be Sally’s music—seductive, insolent, triumphant." (David Denby, New Yorker) GRASS:A Nation’s Battle for Life (Silent film with live original music)(Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, Persia, 1925, 71 min) Cinemapolis Sunday April 6, 7:00 pm New original improvisational score composed by Chris White, Peter Dodge, and Robby Aceto Performed by Chris White, electric cello, looper and effects; Peter Dodge, winds and percussion; Robby Aceto, guitar, looping and ambient effects Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, producers and lighting design Cinemapolis World Premiere GRASS: A NATION'S BATTLE FOR LIFE is a classic adventure documentary by the makers of King Kong. And it is also a film where geographic space is as important as characters. In 1924, neophyte filmmakers Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack hooked up with journalist and sometime spy Marguerite Harrison and set off to film an adventure. They found excitement, danger, and unparalleled drama in the migration of the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (now Iran). They were the first Westerners to travel with the Bakhtiari.Through improvisation and virtuoso technique, Chris White, Peter Dodge, and Robby Aceto create a compelling and evocative score that summons the geographic grandeur and political resonances imbedded in this seldom-screened film. Their score layers jazz, postminimalism, sequencers, and tonal and textural experimentation. The score generates an aural and sensual landscape that itself envelopes the film. Twice a year, more than 50,000 Bakhtiari nomads and half a million animals surmounted impossible obstacles to move their herds to pasture. Over deserts, mountains, rivers, and snowy wastelands the Bakhtiari’s caravan of people, cattle, and goats search for life-sustaining grasslands. They cross the churning and icy waters of the Karun River with rafts made out of inflated goatskins. A classic film about gastronomica and environmental tangibility, GRASS also raises issues of Orientalism, the idea that representations of the so-called East are generated through imagined constructs propagated by the so-called West. Some cinema scholars have argued that its Orientalizing gaze figures the Bakhtiari as unchanging, uncontaminated, heroic essences of a primitivized Middle East. The improvisational score by White, Dodge, and Aceto twists through these ideas to provide spectators with a more complex reading and experience of the film, one that asks for a meditation on and immersion in the spaces the film occupies and imagines. As an artifact, the film chronicles remote parts of Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, leaving archival traces of lands and peoples that no longer exist as they are seen in GRASS. These archival elements resonate and reverberate against our contemporary popular culture representations of the Middle East. Cooper and Schoedsack almost froze when they filmed the breathtaking, almost unbelievable sight of an endless river of men, women, and children—their feet bare or wrapped in rags—winding up the side of the sheer, snow-covered rock face of the 15,000-foot-high Zardeh Kuh mountain. Although many documentary historians consider GRASS second only to Nanook of the North, few people have actually ever seen this legendary film. GRASS is a mythic narrative of migration, settlement, and the quest for food. Co-sponsored by the Ithaca Motion Picture Project, the art, science, and history of filmmaking in central New York HONEYDRIPPER (John Sayles, USA, 2007, 123 PG-13)Fall Creek Pictures, Saturday April 5, 7:00 pm forum with moderator Luke Fenchel with Fe Nunn, jazz pianist and Cynthia Henderson, actress/theater arts, IC; Sunday April 6 4:00 pm forum moderated by Luke Fenchel with Louise Mygatt, vocalist/music history, IC, and Anthony Reed, film studies, Cornell "Elegantly adapted by writer-director John Sayles from his short story 'Keeping Time,' HONEYDRIPPER is classic Sayles cinema: an insightful sketch of assorted common folk whose criss-crossing dreams and agendas unfold against larger, more powerful (and sometimes crushing) sociopolitical and cultural forces. Though steeped in race and class consciousness, the film is never dry or preachy; it makes many of its most salient points with the gentlest touch. Tyrone Purvis (Danny Glover) is a retired blues musician in the late ’50s American South, struggling to keep his live-music jook-joint afloat in the face of a new spot directly across the road that features a jukebox playing newfangled rock & roll. His wife, Delilah (Lisa Gay Hamilton), who works as a maid for a wealthy white family, is in the midst of a crisis of faith that stokes household tensions over how Tyrone earns his living. Meanwhile, a racist sheriff (Stacy Keach) and a landlord who’s trying to sell the Honeydripper Lounge out from under Tyrone seem to strip him of options. Then a young musician with a jerry-rigged electric guitar shows up at Tyrone’s door. Tucked into the plot twists and pushed forward through dialogue that perfectly captures accents and era — some of it lifted from old blues songs — are a host of still-relevant issues. Sayles unfolds these concerns with grace and lots of humor — it helps that his cast is uniformly good, often excellent — and he doesn’t play things easy with regard to race. A scene between Delilah and her boozy boss Amanda (Mary Steenburgen), in which the white woman tries to bond, inadvertently spilling forth the misery of her life and her obliviousness to Delilah’s, treads familiar territory but peels back clichés to find truths across barriers. Time and again in HONEYDRIPPER, situational tension is fractured by Sayles’ universal compassion." (Ernest Hardy, LA Weekly) IT (Silent film with live original music)(Clarence Badger, United States, 1927; 72 min., starring Clara Bow) Cinemapolis Friday April 4, 7:00 pm A musical and theatrical journey through camouflage Fe Nunn and Friends, live jazz score Fe Nunn, keyboard Mike Vitucci, guitar Charles Leo, tenor and soprano saxophone, flute Bill King, drums Cynthia Henderson, spoken word performance Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, producers and lighting design World Premiere IT transformed working class actress Clara Bow into the first mass-market sex symbol—the It Girl. But IT is also a delightful and enticing cruise through the manners and morals of the flapper era, an engaging comedy of manners, class, sexuality, camouflage. Clara Bow, the quintessential flapper, plays Betty Lou Spence, a beautiful, sassy, confident shopgirl at the Waltham Department Store, who eyes Cyrus, the handsome son of the store’s owner. It’s love at first sight—and the chase ensues in one of the greatest romantic comedies of the silent era. Through her dazzle, charm, and spunk, she snares him. And captivates the audience throughout. Misunderstandings, love, sex, and a ukulele converge in the film’s hilarious yacht-bound climax. A scene of high camp hilarity and cutting counterpoint unfolds when matronly author Elinor Glyn, who penned the original definition of “it,” strides through the movie to explain what “it” is. So what was “it”? Across popular culture after this film’s success, “it” was code for sexual magnetism, self-confidence, unselfconsciousness, and vitality. Clara Bow was the brightest star of the jazz age. She was one of the first movie stars to popularize red lipstick, wearing it in the shape of a heart on her lips. With her flaming red hair, she epitomized the freedom and moxie of the flapper as the woman who defies the constraints of patriarchy and passive gender roles. Adolph Zukor, the founder of Paramount Pictures, said Bow “danced even when her feet weren’t moving.” A tomboy as a young girl, Bow rose to stardom from poverty and a difficult life. In Hollywood, the studios overworked and exploited her. The tabloids skewered her as a low-life, uncultured, overly sexual woman who had too many affairs. Unabashedly sexy and spunky, Clara Bow’s legendary performance in this film paved the way for women stars who combine sexual and gender camouflage with presence and power—Dorothy Dandridge, Marilyn Monroe, Madonna, Eartha Kitt, Josephine Baker, the Dixie Chicks, Angelina Jolie. Fe Nunn and Friends provide a fresh musical interpretation of “it” with their unique brand of upstate New York jazz brimming with improvisations, riffs, and grooves. Keyboardist Fe Nunn and guitarist Mike Vitucci have collaborated for over 27 years and serve as the engine of their distinctive sound. With Bill King and Charles Leo, they create an avant-garde jazz style that mixes rhythm and blues with original compositions, altering melodies and reworking harmonies. Actress Cynthia Henderson channels Clara Bow and her impact through the 21st century. She teases out and plays with the hidden histories of women in the entertainment industry who transformed “it” into an expression of sexual camouflage, verve—and daring. Cosponsored by the Ithaca Motion Picture Project, the art, science, and history of filmmaking in central New York THE LAST CONQUISTADOR (John Valadez, USA, 2008, 60 min) Cinemapolis, Sunday April 6, 2:00 pm. We are pleased that director John Valadez will be present at the screening to discuss THE LAST CONQUISTADOR. When the renowned sculptor, John Houser, began creating a monument to the Spanish conquistador Juan de Onate for the city of El Paso, it was supposed to be a little larger than life size. But he secretly harbored a dream: to build the largest bronze equestrian statue ever created in human history. Cloistered away in a remote and forgotten corner of Mexico City, John and his son Ethan worked endlessly for ten years crafting an exquisite and foreboding icon. To some, it is magnificent, alluring and seductive, a fitting tribute to the extraordinary contribution Hispanic people have made to the building of the American west. It is a history that they feel has often been maligned or ignored by mainstream historians. To others, it is a frightful reminder of a time when the sword and the cross were used to decimate those who would defy the will of the Spanish crown. The people of El Paso, Texas, where the statue is being constructed are the conflicted sons and daughters of both the Indians who were enslaved and the Spanish who brutalized them. Protests, conflicting versions of history, and an artist's quixotic quest transform this isolated border town in unexpected ways. MAN PUSH CART (Ramin Bahrani, USA, 2006, 87 min) Fall Creek Pictures, Sunday April 6, 2 pm. We are happy to announce that 32-year old director Ramin Bahrani will be present at the festival to introduce CHOP SHOP (and MAN PUSH CART) and conduct Q&A after the films. "Every frame of the beautiful MAN PUSH CART expresses writer-director Ramin Bahrani's compassion for a street vendor (Ahmad Razvi), who before sunrise leaves his tiny Brooklyn apartment and heads for a warehouse from which he will pull his large, shiny cart blocks to a corner in midtown Manhattan and set up for business, selling coffee, tea, doughnuts and bagels to passersby.A trim, bearded Pakistani immigrant in his 30s, Ahmad is a figure of resolute dignity, and Bahrani immerses the viewer in the rituals and rhythms of Ahmad's daily existence, solitary and full of drudgery. Bahrani is intent on making his audience take notice of an individual so easily overlooked as to be all but invisible, and only gradually — and then elliptically — does he reveal aspects of Ahmad's personal life. Ahmad is driven to get ahead so that he can afford to have his small son come and live with him. The boy lives with his late wife's parents, who blame Ahmad for their daughter's death and claim her son is now theirs. That the boy is indifferent to his father does not deter Ahmad's pursuit of his dream.A pair of encounters lifts Ahmad's spirits. One of his customers, Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), recognizes Ahmad not only as a fellow Pakistani but also as a onetime rock star. (It would seem that Ahmad gave up his singing career in order to please his wife and bring her to America to join her parents.) A wealthy blowhard, Mohammad talks about getting Ahmad a comeback concert; in the meantime, Ahmad is grateful just to get the chance to make some extra money painting the man's apartment. Then Ahmad discovers that a lovely young woman, Noemi (Leticia Dolera), has started working at a newsstand near his corner....Bahrani, a North Carolinian of Iranian descent, has said that principal among his many influences is Albert Camus' 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' and Ahmad's life does indeed seem to be a process of repeatedly rolling a rock up an incline only to see it roll down over and over, endlessly. Like Sisyphus, Ahmad seems cruelly trapped yet never gives up. A mix of grit and grandeur, the New York captured by impeccable cinematographer Michael Simmonds becomes integral to Ahmad's story and is not just backdrop. MAN PUSH CART, largely the work of newcomers and near-newcomers, is a remarkably disciplined, subtle film that avoids striking a 'triumph of the human spirit' note or any other cliché." (Kevin Thomas, LA Times) MAN PUSH CART won the critics’ prize at London and three Independent Spirit Awards, including best first feature. THE PRICE OF SUGAR (Bill Haney, USA, 2007, 90 min) Cinemapolis, Saturday April 5, 7:00 pm Panel moderated by Jodi Cohen, Speech Communication, IC, with Shaianne Oesterreich, Economics, IC, and Alicia Swords, Sociology, IC Great, another movie giving Americans one more thing to feel guilty about on their weekend shopping trip to Wal-Mart. Except THE PRICE OF SUGAR, Bill Haney's documentary about the dark side of the sugar industry in the Dominican Republic, is great. THE PRICE OF SUGAR is designed to educate, outrage and finally spur viewers to action. That it does so with vibrant visual style and an engaging narrative makes it that rare consciousness- raising film that's not only good for you, but a joy to watch. In large part, that's due to Father Christopher Hartley, a charismatic Catholic priest who has made it his life's work to aid Haitian migrant laborers who come to the Dominican Republic for a better life harvesting sugar cane, only to find indentured servitude. With him as their guide, the filmmakers lift the veil on the scandalous conditions under which the workers are stripped of their passports upon crossing the border, then forced to live in squalor. When the priest successfully leads them to organize for better work and living conditions, he comes under fire from the family that owns the plantations as well as from the national media. Narrated by Paul Newman, THE PRICE OF SUGAR has been handsomely produced, and viewers won't believe Father Christopher's personal story, which adds an ironic and finally deeply touching twist. See THE PRICE OF SUGAR and you'll never look at a Twinkie quite the same way again." (Ann Hornaday, Washington Post) SCOUTS ARE CANCELLED (John Scott, Canada/USA, 2007, 72 min) Cinemapolis, Saturday April 5, 4 pm. We are pleased to announce that director John Scott will be present at the screening for audience discussion. One day John Stiles--a middle-aged writer down on his luck and working as a telemarketer in Toronto--lost it. Finger on the dial button, he threw away his prewritten telemarketer script and launched into the character and accent from his rural upbringing in Nova Scotia. His next customer was greeted with, "Mrs. Farrell, you are tighter than a mouse's hole stretched over a barrel--give 'er a whirl, girl--you got nothing to lose," accompanied by the sound of sirens, dogs, and Ski-Doos. He won a DVD player for making the most sales that month. Subsequently he decided to start going to open-mike readings, developed a cult following, and then published two books with Insomniac Press. Director John Scott, who has known Stiles for 20 years, intelligently crafts a nonlinear approach to this documentary that highlights the medium of film, much as Stiles's writing plays with the formal aspects of poetry. STEAMBOAT BILL, JR.(Silent film with live original music)(Charles Reisner, United States, 1928, 71 min., starring Buster Keaton) Cinemapolis, Saturday April 5, 2:00 pm World Premiere With an Americana-inspired musical score performed live to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the film The Common Railers Mike Costello, acoustic upright bass and slide dobro Chad Crumm, fiddle and banjo Peter Glanville, acoustic guitar Gordon Rowland, mandolin, banjo, and accordion Ann Michel and Phil Wilde, producers and lighting design Saturday, April 5, 2008, 2:00 p.m. One of the most inventive and hilarious physical comedians of the silent era, Buster Keaton conjures cinema as a conceptual environment, a game of mastery over machines, nature, space, and time. In this performance, the Common Railers, a band specializing in Americana music, enter into lively game play with STEAMBOAT BILL JR. ,mixing strategies from the exuberant flourishes of bluegrass to the layerings of American composer Charles Ives. The plot of STEAMBOAT BILL mobilizes games, abstract strategies, and risk. Games demand competition, bluffing, teams, winning, and losing. In the riverside town of River Junction, Captain William Canfield owns an old steamship that competes with the brand new passenger vessel of John James King. William is informed that his unknown son William Canfield Jr. will arrive by train from Boston to visit him. When Willie, a dandy from the East, arrives, William trains him to work the steamboat. However, Willie begins to date Marion King, the daughter of James King—against the will of their fathers. When a hurricane whirls through River Junction, Willie rescues his father and his future father-in-law from the floods in one of the landmark scenes of American silent film. STEAMBOAT BILL JR. torques many tropes of American culture: Huckleberry Finn, the Western, the disaster film, the romance, inventiveness, vaudeville, economic competition, the forces of nature. One of the most underrecognized yet salient references in STEAMBOAT BILL JR. is of the great flood of 1927, arguably the most widespread and devastating natural disaster in American history. During its most severe phase, the Mississippi River swelled to more than 100 miles wide in some areas. As secretary of commerce, Herbert Hoover’s response to this national crisis helped him become president. But African Americans, antagonized by their disparate treatment under relief efforts, began, for the first time, to gravitate to the Democratic party. They started the process of building what would become the New Deal Coalition. All of Buster Keaton’s films, but most especially this one, spin dialectics between competition and collectivity, interaction and immersion, fun and flow. His films are processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, where everyday objects and natural forces are never accepted, but are elements to be altered. Keaton plays with mise-en-scène in a game of radically reengineering the borders between the body and geographic space. He rewrites and manipulates the environment. Acrobatic, agile, and adroit, Keaton toggles between physical spaces and imagined geographies through touch. The Common Railers employ gaming as an aleatory tactic in their musical performance with STEAMBOAT BILL JR. A mélange of American folk, alt country, bluegrass, blues, and rockability, their music switches between syncopation and downbeat rhythms. Emerging out of working class and rural cultures, Americana music often plumbs themes of sadness, heartbreak, loss of family, jobs, romance—narratives submerged in nearly every silent comedy. But it also conveys just the opposite—unbridled exuberance—through inventive instrumentals, ingenious interplay of musical genres, spontaneous solos, and free play among musicians. The Common Railers’ musical game with Steamboat Bill Jr. has fun ricocheting through this spectrum of Americana music. Cosponsored by the Division of Interdisciplinary and International Studies and the 7th Art Corporation, the nonprofit organization that runs Cinemapolis and Fall Creek Theaters STEEP (Mark D. Obenhaus, USA, 2007, 92 PG) Fall Creek Pictures, Friday April 4, 9:30 pm, Sunday April 6, 4:00 pm with Stewart Auyash, Public Health, IC “STEEP is one of those rare endeavors able to touch on the human condition without neglecting the film’s true star: big-mountain skiing. Unless you are a fan of that endeavor or a similar extreme activity, the characters and their belief that cheating death is the only way to feel alive may be completely unrelatable. To director Mark D. Obenhaus’ credit, this hazardous code becomes a highlight of the film; their blank faces and emotionless responses to the deaths of friends evidence this is a different breed. In fact, the most sobering reminder of this is delivered post-mortem by one of the central characters as he talks about death as an acceptable consequence of his way of life. Still, the participants command admiration and ooze inspiration. Obenhaus bombards you with adrenaline-filled images of amazing feats, contrasted by the casual commentary on the death-defying visual. The characters’ chronological introductions explain the evolution of big-mountain-skiing from hiking to the peaks to heli-skiing mimics the enthusiasts’ pursuit from 40-degree slopes in its infancy to the 55-degree variety the skiers seek today. Obenhaus mixes archival footage with marvelous shots of his supporting characters zigzagging across his extreme-skiing canvas. Some of the images are technical marvels, shot from helicopters, aside cliffs and from the depths of mountain passes. Obenhaus and cinematographer Erich Roland have a flair worthy of an art film, and the stomach-dropping runs, jumps and spills pace the movie well between the historical markers. STEEP is certain to appeal to the extreme sport enthusiast, but it also deserves a mass audience for its incredible imagery and window into a lifestyle most can’t fathom; it’s nearly impossible to walk away without a new motivation to find what can make you feel the way these characters do." (Scott Schueller, Chicago Tribune) SUMMER PALACE (Lou Ye, China, 2008, 140 R) Fall Creek, Saturday April 5, 4:00 pm with Dale Hudson, Film Studies, Amherst College, and Sheetal Majithia, South Asian/Cinema Studies, U. of Penn., + Sunday April 6, 7:00 pm with Tim Murray, author of New Media Art and Cinematic Folds "Toward the end of Lou Ye’s SUMMER PALACE, Yu Hong (Lei Hao) reflects that her college years were the 'most confused' time in her life. A lot of us might feel similarly, but Yu Hong, the beautiful and passionate heroine of this beautiful and passionate film, is something of a special case. As a young woman, freshly arrived at Beijing University from a provincial town, she shows a romantic, sometimes reckless appetite for experience, confiding in her diary a longing to live with maximum intensity. She satisfies this desire, in the movie’s heady, headlong first half, through a series of friendships and flirtations, most of all her fierce, jealous on-and-off relationship with Zhou Wei (Xiaodong Guo), a skinny, brooding intellectual and the love of her life. But Yu Hong and Zhou Wei — and the various other friends, rivals and hookups who round out Mr. Lou’s portrait — are hardly ordinary university students. Or if they are, their matriculation comes at an extraordinary moment. Yu Hong arrives in Beijing in 1988, and her first year at the university, already full of emotional and sexual upheaval, ends with the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and their violent suppression by the Chinese government. SUMMER PALACE, which was first shown in competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, is remarkable for its candor about politics and sex. Perhaps unsurprisingly, its honesty has not been appreciated by Chinese authorities, who banned Mr. Lou from making movies for five years after he brought it to Cannes without their permission. But the film’s ardent, unsentimental embrace of youthful idealism is likely to strike a chord with anyone who can recall — or imagine — such feelings overtaking his or her own life...." (A.O. Scott, New York Times) TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE (Alex Gibney, USA, 106 R) Fall Creek Pictures, Saturday April 5, 4:00 pm with Zillah Eisenstein, author of Sexual Decoys: Gender, Race and War in Imperial Democracy and Richard Stumbar, attorney, Schlather, Geldenhuys, Stumbar and Falk, and 9:30 pm Oscar-winner, Best Documentary Feature "Among the dark films nominated for Oscars this year is Alex Gibney's rage-inducing expose of how the Bush administration came to condone torture in the name of national security. Thoroughly documented and with remarkably candid interviews with the perpetrators of and bureaucrats behind the violence, the documentary raises the question buried beneath the march of wartime headlines: How will the United States be affected by its disastrous abrogation of human rights and rule of law, now and for decades to come? Gibney, who previously directed 'Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room' and who served as executive producer of the Iraq war documentary 'No End in Sight' (also nominated for an Oscar), excels at morally outraged muckraking. His film is built around the case of Diliwar, a taxi driver who was detained in Afghanistan in 2002 and who died in American custody at the Bagram prison a few months later. The death of the taxi driver, who had no known connection to al Qaeda or the Taliban and was never charged with a crime, was even documented by the U.S. prison coroner as homicide. Diliwar is the means by which Gibney traces a line of accountability from the abuses that took place at Bagram to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, practices that Alberto Gonzales rationalized as 'coercive interrogation techniques' [and which] were sanctioned by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and probably George Bush himself. The film notes that of the hundreds of prisoners detained since September 2006 by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, only 1 percent have been convicted. Meanwhile, of the more than 100 deaths in U.S. custody, 37 have been officially declared homicides by the U.S. military. TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE will go down in film history as a damning historical document of the Bush administration's wartime expansion of executive powers." (Tamara Straus, SF Chronicle) TERROR'S ADVOCATE (Barbet Schroeder, France, 135 min) Cinemapolis, Saturday April 5, 4:00 pm with Megan McLemore, attorney Human Rights Watch and Todd Schack, journalism, IC "For just a moment, ignore politics. Consider Jacques Vergès simply as star. The radical French lawyer is an absolutely compelling figure onscreen: exotic, resolute, beguilingly smug. He holds the screen with an effortless authority Gerard Depardieu might envy. Of course, it's impossible to ignore politics where Vergès is concerned. It's because of politics that he's the subject of Barbet Schroeder's absorbing documentary. At once biography, spy thriller, and moral meditation, the film raises an acute if unanswerable question: At what point does idealism become nihilism - or worse? Vergès, 82, has spent more than half a century outraging establishment opinion. He has defended a clientele that runs the ethical gamut from righteous (Algerian anti-colonialists) to monstrous (Slobodan Milosevic). 'It was exhilarating,' Vergès says of defending the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. The son of a Vietnamese mother and French diplomat father, Vergès fought with the Free French in World War II and then took up the law. A fierce anti-imperialism drew Vergès to the Algerian cause. He represented members of the Algerian National Liberation Front in several high-profile trials that helped reveal the French military's use of torture. 'Morally, the use of torture was a terrible defeat,' Vergès observes. American viewers can make their own inferences from that remark.After Algerian independence, Vergès became involved in the Palestinian cause. Then, from 1970-78, he vanished. Did he take refuge in Pol Pot's Cambodia? (Vergès and the Khmer Rouge leader knew each other as students in Paris.) Was he secretly an agent of the French - or East Germans? Perhaps he was simply on the lam from creditors. Vergès's reemergence saw his clientele grow increasingly beyond the pale: the Red Army Faction, Iranian assassination squads, Carlos the Jackal. Outrageous controversialist meets brilliant attorney, and fact intertwines with fiction. It's a mark of Schroeder's scrupulousness that he leaves it up to the viewer to draw the line between the two in Vergès' performance, a memorable--and troubling--star turn." (Mark Feeney, Boston Globe) WAR/DANCE (Andrea Nix Fine, Sean Fine, USA, 2007, 105 PG-13) Cinemapolis Sunday April 6, 4:00 pm with Baruch Whitehead, drummer/musician, IC "The elevator pitch for this beautifully filmed documentary by directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine sounds like a crowd-pleasing African version of 'Mad Hot Ballroom': A school of northern Ugandan civil war refugees takes a shot at winning the country's National Music Competition with their tribe's 500-year-old dance, the Bwola. But the stakes are far higher here, and the horror and heartwarming equally compounded. Many of the teens at the Patongo refugee camp were abducted by the rebel Lord's Resistance Army and forced to commit grisly killings; others watched their family members be raped or chopped to pieces with machetes. WAR/DANCE hones in on three children, letting them tell their stories while painterly panoramas of African landscape fill the screen. But the tension of a brutality that can hardly be imagined let alone depicted, and the dignity of these precociously adult children as they must press on with their lives with little room for mourning or self-pity, is the point. The climactic trip to the competition offers an uplift that feels more like relief than triumph after the film's most disturbing tales. In one scene, a 14-year-old xylophone player visits a rebel killer at a detainment camp to find out whether his brother is still alive. When the rebel says abducting children was just what he had to do, the child can only shake his head and say, 'I will let my mother know so we can move on with our lives.' In another scene, a 13-year-old girl joins her mother to visit, for the first time, the spot where her father is buried. Her raw emotion, and her mother's loving exhortations toward strength, may be the most profound thing you see onscreen this year." (Rachel Howard, SF Chronicle) View FLEFF website Cinemapolis ___________________________________________________________ Cinemapolis and Fall Creek will present 19 Festival films that week, most scheduled for Friday-Sunday March 31-April 2. Special FLEFF passes are on sale at Cinemapolis, Fall Creek, the Ithaca College Bookstore and the Ithaca College Campus Center. Tickets to 5 individual showings--BLACK GOLD, THE NAMESAKE, DISAPPEARANCES, and HIS PEOPLE--are now on sale at Cinemapolis and Fall Creek, or can be bought at the door. Most films will be presented only once or twice, so please study the schedule carefully to avoid disappointment! There will be audience discussions at every Fall Creek/Cinemapolis FLEFF screening--led by a total of 50 distinguished speakers from Ithaca College, Cornell, Hobart & William Smith, Syracuse University, SUNY-Binghamton, Amherst College, Middlesex University in England, and the University of Denver. 2007 FLEFF SCHEDULE FLEFF FORUM: How to Get Your Break in the Big (and Little) Metropoli(Cinemapolis, Saturday March 31st, 11:00 a.m.)--featuring an all-star line up of entertainment industry insiders, screenwriters, and feature film directors, including Steve Gordon, Giovanna Pollarolo, Steve Ginsberg, Craig Volk, Alberto Arvello, Jay Craven and IC�s Elisabeth Nonas 2007 FLEFF FILM LIST (in alphabetical order) AMEN (France/Germany/Romania/United States, 132 min.) Fall Creek, Sunday April 1 7:15 pm DIRECTED BY CONSTANTIN COSTA-GAVRAS. Two systems: the Nazi machine versus the Vatican and Allied diplomacy. Two men struggling from the inside: On one side, Kurt Gerstein, a real-life chemist and SS officer, who supplied the death camps with zyklon B while he tirelessly denounced the crimes and alerted the Allies, the Pope, the Germans, and their churches at his family�s and his own risk. On the other, Ricardo Fontana, a young Jesuit, a fictitious character who represents all the priests who had the heart to struggle against savagery, often paying for their courage with their lives. AMEN is presented as part of the Tournees French Film Festival BLACK GOLD (UK, ) Cinemapolis, Friday March 30, 7:15 pm, with panel discussion "As coffee drinkers know, not all beans are equal, but the meaning of inequality gets an entirely different spin in Marc and Nick Francis' handsome and astute doc, BLACK GOLD. The Brit brothers study where some of the world's finest beans -- including Harar, from southern Ethiopia -- are grown and how they're marketed, and ask why people producing such a first-class product live in near-starvation conditions.BLACK GOLD tells of the fair-trade coffee movement, in which growers arrange to directly receive a higher percentage of sales revenues by cutting out as many middlemen as possible. As rep of the Oromo Coffee Farmers Co-op Union, which embraces 74 southern Ethiopian co-ops and more than 70,000 farmers, Tadesse Meskela travels between the grassroots and the international market buying his groups' prized beans. He's in the ideal position to observe the growers' thin margin of survival and, contrapuntally, third-party brokers repping such coffee giants as Nestle and Kraft -- in tandem with the coffee commodity exchanges in New York and London, where daily prices are set -- working to maintain low prices. Rather than venting and indulging in easy anti-corporate pot shots, sober pic is more interested in Meskela's honest efforts to work every angle to get the co-ops the best possible return by bypassing the commodity exchanges and working closely with buyers. The Francises are aces behind the camera, displaying an elegant sense of composition that makes their subject visually ravishing. Andreas Kapsalis' gorgeous score lends doc a grand quality." (Robert Koehler, Variety) CARTONEROS (61 min.,Argentina, 2006) Cinemapolis, 4:35 Saturday March 31 w/ filmmaker Ernesto Livon-Grosman, moderated by Amy Villarejo CARTONEROS follows the paper recycling process in Buenos Aires from the trash pickers who collect paper informally through middlemen in warehouses, to executives in large corporate mills. The process exploded into a multimillion dollar industry after Argentina�s latest economic collapse. The documentary is both a record of an economic and social crisis and an invitation to audiences to rethink the value of trash. CHANGING TIMES (LES TEMPS QUI CHANGENT) (95, unrated, French and Arabic with subtitles) Fall Creek Pictures, Sat. March 31, 2:15 pm Antoine (Gerard Depardieu) arrives in Tangiers from Europe to supervise the building of an audiovisual center. The secret aim of his journey is to link up with C�cile (Catherine Deneuve), whom he has continued to love with a silent passion for more than thirty years. C�cile emigrated to North Africa and married Natan, a Jewish-Moroccan doctor. Sami, their son, arrives at his parents� place with his girlfriend Nadia, who is raising Sa�d, a young child. Sami and Nadia help each other to pursue their separate passions. Nadia tries to reconnect with her twin sister, A�cha, who lives in Tangiers. A�cha has distanced herself and refuses to see Nadia. Sami attempts to reconcile his relationship with Bilal with his love for Nadia. Antoine tries to win over C�cile and reignite the passion she once felt for him. While at first she thought he was crazy and immature, C�cile feels restless and begins to question her life. When a terrible accident sends Antoine into a coma, C�cile stays at his bedside in Tangiers while Natan moves to Casablanca. "Every character in CHANGING TIMES, Andr� T�chin�s rich, warmhearted exploration of cultural collision in contemporary Morocco, oscillates between two worlds and two ideas about the meaning of experience." (Stephen Holden, NYT) CHANGING TIMES is presented as part of the Tournees French film festival CROSSING THE BRIDGE: THE SOUND OF ISTANBUL (Turkey/Germany, 2005, 90 min.) Cinemapolis, Sat. March 31, 9:35 pm Alexander Hacke (of the German avant-garde band Einst�rzende Neubauten) first came into contact with the city and its music while producing the score for the movie Head-On. A collector of musical styles and an experimenter with sound, Hacke roams the streets of Istanbul with his mobile recording studio and �magic mike� to assemble an inspired portrait of Turkish music. DAYS OF GLORY (INDIGENES)(France, 120 ) DAYS OF GLORY begins an open run at Cinemapolis Friday March 30 "This remarkable, powerfully entertaining French Moroccan Algerian co-production tells the hidden story of the massive North African troop participation that made possible the ultimate French victory in Europe. Under its original title of 'Indigenes' or 'Natives,' the film, nominated for Best Foreign Film in this year's Oscar race, was perhaps the major surprise at Cannes. It won the best actor award for its four key cast members and ignited a debate about whether France had done right by these soldiers. The result, just two months ago, was a change in government policy bringing foreign combatant pensions into line with what French veterans are paid. The debate about who feels welcome in today's France is one of that country's most pressing. But DAYS OF GLORY is hardly a tract. It is above all a film that is feelingly made and steeped in the strongest emotions. As directed by Rachid Bouchareb, himself born in France to Algerian immigrants, DAYS OF GLORY is a kind of a North African 'Saving Private Ryan,' a taut, involving film that delivers all the things we look for in war movies and does so with intelligence and integrity." (Kenneth Turan, LA Times) DISAPPEARANCES (USA, unrated) Fall Creek Pictures,Sat. March 31, 7:15 and Sun. April 1, 9:35. Director Jay Craven, plus Judy Hyman and Jeff Claus, composers of the score, will be present for audience Q & A at both screenings. DISAPPEARANCES is a FLEFF premiere. Legendary actor-songwriter Kris Kristofferson stars as a schemer and dreamer in a spellbinding tale of high-stakes whiskey smuggling, a family's mysterious past, and a young boy's rite of passage. The time: 1932, just months before the repeal of prohibition. The place: Vermont's Northeast Kingdom straddling the Vermont/Canadian border. Quebec Bill (Kristofferson), desperate to raise money to preserve his cattle herd through a long winter, resorts to whiskey smuggling, a traditional family occupation. He takes his 15-year-old son, Wild Bill, on an unforgettable trip that will long remain etched in the viewer's mind: a journey through vast reaches of the Canadian wilderness and into a haunted and elusive past. What they find is the stuff of genuine legend. Also starring: Genevieve Bujold, Luis Guzman, Charlie McDermott DRAGONES, Destino de Fuego (80 min. 2006, Peru) Cinemapolis, 2:15 p.m. Saturday March 31: with screenwriter Giovanna Pollarolo Dragones, Destino de Fuego is a fantastic tale about an awkward young dragon prince who was raised as a condor and must learn to grow into the role of a hero. A gem from Peru�s budding animation industry, this beautiful story, directed by Eduardo Schuldt and scripted by Giovanna Pollarolo, chronicles a dragon�s journey to uncover his family�s past. Returning home, he discovers his village is destroyed. Along the way, he discovers that the secret to making his world a better place is to respect all living creatures-- no matter how different they might be. This is the latest feature animation from the pioneering Peruvian production house of Alpamayo. Fun for the entire family FATELESS (140 R, Hungary) Cinemapolis, Sat. March 31, 4:35 pm & Sun. March 31, 4:35 pm "In his work as a cinematographer on such Istv�n Szab� films as Sunshine and Mephisto, Lajos Koltai has excelled at creating a visual quality as reflective of light as etched amber. In FATELESS, a disturbingly beautiful film that marks his directorial debut, Koltai applies that same painterly taste in palette and composition to a Holocaust story that is, of course, only one of millions. And in the juxtaposition of cataclysmic matter-of-fact misery and cinematic poetry, the filmmaker finds a calmly stunning way to convey the experience of living with death as something intimate, and, unnervingly, almost natural. Based on the autobiographical novel by Hungarian Nobel Laureate Imre Kert�sz and built in vignettes, FATELESS follows the random fate of Gyuri (expressively still Marcell Nagy), a 14-year-old boy in Budapest whose Jewish identity means little to him when he's taken off a city bus and deposited first in Auschwitz, then Buchenwald. Survival doesn't suffice to describe either the movie's profoundly unsentimental attitude or the instinct with which, at war's end, a dead-eyed Gyuri returns to Budapest." (Lisa Schwarzbaum, EW) As young Gyuri tells one of his old neighbors after his return to Budapest, the camps were not hell. "I can't imagine hell," he says. "But the camps were real." HABANA, HAVANA WITH FILMMAKER ALBERTO ARVELO (80 min., Venezuela) Cinemapolis, 9:35 pm Friday March 30 Venezuelan director Alberto Arvelo Mendoza subtly captures the lives of two Cubans in a fictional film with a strong documentary style. Ra�l Eguren gives a commanding performance as the mature gentleman from the Cuban countryside who journeys to Havana on a quest to buy elegant shoes for his young daughter, while the other main character, a woman, goes through her daily routine, walking in the city. Havana reveals itself as a big city in which everything good and bad is possible. HIS PEOPLE (91, unrated, U.S., silent film with live klezmer score)Cinemapolis Sunday April 1, 2007 at 2:15 and 7:15: We are proud to present the 1925 silent film HIS PEOPLE with the PREMIERE OF A LIVE KLEZMER SCORE BY PETER ROTHBART. The screenings are being presented by Ithaca College and the Fingerlakes Environmental Film Festival as a benefit for the new 7th Art Capital Campaign to build "A Theater As Good As Its Movies." Tickets to the benefit are $15 or $12 with FLEFF festival pass (consult your tax advisor for charitable deduction information) and may be purchased in advance at Cinemapolis or Fall Creek Pictures during regular open hours. "Edward Sloman directs this heart-tugging, nostalgic Yiddish silent family melodrama, with universal appeal, that's set in the early years of the last century in Manhattan's Lower East Side. It evocatively captures in great detail the ghetto neighborhood (a pushcart peddler tells a customer: "What do you expect from a fish, perfume!") and the deepening changes between the old world immigrants and their American born children. Drawn from a story by Isadore Bernstein and written by Alfred A. Cohn and Charles E. Whittaker HIS PEOPLE updates the biblical story of Jacob and Esau. It centers on the Russian-immigrant Cominsky family, where the grey bearded scholarly patriarch David (Rudolph Schildkraut) never fully adjusted to his new settings and toils as a poor pushcart peddler in his Lower East Side neighborhood; his wife Rose (Rosa Rosanova) is depicted as a long-suffering housewife raising their two sons Morris (Arthur Lubin) and the younger Sammy (George Lewis). Goody-two-shoes Morris, his father's pride and joy, becomes an ambitious lawyer who denies the existence of his immigrant parents to the upscale family of the girl he is dating. Sammy delivers newspapers and becomes a prize-fighter, which displeases the old man so much he kicks him out of the house. Sammy, who secretly uses his fists to pay the bills for his deceitful brother Morris's college education, further infuriates his father by dating a pretty Irish neighbor. By movie's end, the patriarch has come to understand the relative merits of his sons. IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS (United States/Iraq, 2006, 94 min) Fall Creek Pictures, Sunday April 1, 4:35 pm and 7:15 pm: with George Sapio An opus in three parts, James Longley's IRAQ IN FRAGMENTS offers a series of intimate, passionately-felt portraits: A fatherless 11-year-old is apprenticed to the domineering owner of a Baghdad garage; Sadr followers in two Shiite cities rally for regional elections while enforcing Islamic law at the point of a gun; a family of Kurdish farmers welcomes the U.S. presence, which has allowed them a measure of freedom previously denied. American director James Longley spent more than two years filming in Iraq to create this stunningly photographed, poetically rendered documentary of the war-torn country as seen through the eyes of Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds. Winner of best director, best cinematography, and best editing awards in the 2006 Sundance Film Festival documentary competition, the film was also awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the 2006 Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. JONESTOWN:The Life and Death of the Peoples Temple (85 unrated, USA) Fall Creek Sunday April 1 4:35 pm and 9:35 pm "One of the most amazing elements of Stanley Nelson's riveting new documentary about Jim Jones and the Peoples Temple is just how much film footage and audio had been recorded of this cult. That this footage -- much of it never before seen publicly, some of it apparently recently declassified by the CIA--exists makes JONESTOWN one of the year's most important documentaries, a real must-see. Nelson ('The Murder of Emmet Till')doesn't demonize or glamorize Jones, but takes a levelheaded approach at understanding how his parishioners could fall so deeply under his spell. He weaves moving recollections from cult survivors with film footage and photographs to trace Jones' beginnings in rural Indiana to the flowering of his temple in Northern California, its rising political force in San Francisco and finally history's biggest mass-murder/suicide in the jungles of Guyana. Jones' vision of a utopian commune tapped into the discontent of people who no longer trusted conventional government and society. Because of that hunger, and Jones' undeniable talent for exploiting it, the Peoples Temple flourished -- even as cult members noticed his strange behavior. Although Jones provided health care and organized his commune expertly, he often drove his followers to work long hours, even to the point where they were not sleeping. On Nov. 18, 1978, at Jones' urging, more than 900 members of Jones' commune drank cyanide-laced fruit punch and died. Nearly 28 years later, Nelson has presented an accomplished portrait of, as he puts it, the 'thin lines between faith and zealotry,' an issue that has become suddenly relevant since 9/11." (G.Allen Johnson, SF Chronicle) LA PETITE JERUSALEM (96, unrated, France) Cinemapolis, Sat. March 31, 7:15 pm La Petite Jerusalem is the nickname of Sarcelles, a low-income housing neighborhood near Paris. Among the high number of Jewish immigrants who live there, a Tunisian family of eight shares a cramped apartment: Laura (a French-born, 18-year-old student), her sister Mathilde, their mother, Mathilde�s husband Ariel, and the couple�s four children. Independent and strong-willed, Laura refuses Ariel�s orthodoxy and her mother�s superstition. Instead, she throws herself into the study of Kant which leads her to take evening walks. On one such walk, she meets an Algerian-Muslim immigrant named Djamel. While Laura�s life is disrupted by their love affair, her sister Mathilde finds out that her husband is cheating on her. Mathilde turns to a religious counselor who opens her eyes to the possibility of sexual pleasure within marriage and to the different ways in which religious faith can be enacted. Her struggling marriage is revived, but Laura�s relationship with Djamel becomes complicated by his family�s disapproval of her. All this is taking place while tensions between Muslim and Jewish communities are rising. In her first feature film, Karin Albou delicately depicts the intimate lives of two women while raising questions of religious interpretation, freedom, sexuality and family relationships. (LA PETITE JERUSALEM is presented as part of the Tournees French Film Festival) L'INTRUS (THE INTRUDER) (130 R, France) Fall Creek Friday March 30, 7:15 pm Louis Trebor, a mysterious loner, lives in an isolated cabin in the woods on the French-Swiss border. An enigmatic figure and an emotionally distant father who seems to prefer the company of his dogs, Louis has little contact with his grown son Sidney. Louis� contacts seem limited to an affair with a local pharmacist and an unspoken attraction to a beautiful, aloof dog breeder. An ailing heart forces Louis to leave his snow-covered wilderness to retrieve money in a bank vault in Geneva to purchase a new heart on the black market. After recovering from transplant surgery in Asia, Louis discovers he is being shadowed by a mysterious, unnamed Russian woman. He begins a boat voyage south, slowly making his way back to his former home on a remote island near Tahiti. The Intruder is a mysterious and enthralling story about fresh starts and the possibility of escape, a tale of both inner and outer travels. Like all of Claire Denis� films, it explores the literal and metaphorical borders where natives and intruders intersect, searching for signs of home within and beyond the barriers of countries, cultures, and families. (L'INTRUS is presented as part of the Tournees French Film Festival) THE NAMESAKE (India/United States, 2007, 122 min.) SNEAK PREVIEW: Fall Creek Saturday March 31 7:15 pm; with discussion leaders Zillah Eisenstein and Anjali Nerlekar Based on the novel by Jhumpa Lahiri and directed by Mira Nair (Salaam Bombay, Monsoon Wedding,Vanity Fair), THE NAMESAKE is the story of the Ganguli family, whose move from Calcutta to New York evokes a lifelong balancing act to meld to a new world without forgetting the old. Though parents Ashoke and Ashima long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, they take great pride in the opportunities their sacrifices have afforded their children. Paradoxically, their son Gogol is torn about finding his own identity without losing his heritage. Even Gogol�s name represents the family�s journey into the unknown. SAVED BY DEPORTATION:AN UNKNOWN ODYSSEY OF POLISH JEWS, with filmmaker Slawomir Grunberg and members of the film crew (USA, 75 min.) Fall Creek, Friday. March 30, 7:15 pm In 1940, a year before the Nazis started deporting Jews to death camps, Joseph Stalin ordered the deportation of approximately 200,000 Polish Jews from Russian-occupied Eastern Poland to forced labor settlements in the Soviet interior. As cruel as Stalin's deportations were, ultimately they largely saved Jewish lives, for the deportees constituted the overwhelming majority of Polish Jews who escaped the Nazi Holocaust. Saved by Deportation not only tells this story, but it re-traces the path Asher and Shyfra Scharf traveled more than 60 years ago from Poland to Siberia to the former Soviet states of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia. (Local filmmaker Slawomir Grunberg collaborated with Robert Podgursky on the making of the film.) TOCAR Y LUCHAR (To Play and To Fight)--WITH FILMMAKER ALBERTO ARVELO MENDOZA (Venezuela, 70 min.) Cinemapolis Sunday April 1 4:35 pm and 9:35 pm TOCAR Y LUCHAR has won the audience award for Best Documentary at the 2007 Miami Film Festival This film presents the captivating story of the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra System, an incredible network of hundreds of orchestras formed within most of Venezuela�s towns and villages. Once a modest program designed to expose rural children to the wonders of music, the system has become one of the most important and beautiful social phenomena in modern history. WILD SIDE (93 unrated France) Fall Creek, Sat. March 31, 9:35 St�phanie (whose birth name is Pierre) is a transsexual prostitute who plies her trade in Parisian discos, parks, and hotel rooms. She lives with Jamel, a 30-year-old North African who also turns tricks. One night, St�phanie meets Mikhail, an illegal Russian immigrant. He soon falls in love with her and she decides to live with both partners. Summoned to her childhood home in the north of France by her dying mother Liliane, St�phanie tries to provide comfort to a woman who has difficulties accepting her son�s unconventional sexuality. St�phanie is soon joined by Mikhail and Jamel. Together they form a nurturing web of comfort and support which helps her gradually make up with her mother. Her childhood is revealed through flashbacks: a childhood marked by the early death of her father and her sister Caroline, to whom she was deeply attached. Liliane finally dies in her sleep. St�phanie buries her mother and closes the family home, destroying all of Liliane�s possessions. Back in Paris, St�phanie, Mikhail and Jamel are faced with an uncertain future: they live on the margins of a society that is uncomfortable with people like them. The camerawork of Agn�s Godard (Beau Travail, Strayed) renders the film deeply melancholic, sensual, and poetic. �Whether the camera is trained on the human body, the architecture of Paris, the fields of northern France or dancers gyrating in a disco, the movie gives you the feeling of rediscovering the world, moment by moment, in a revelatory waking dream. It is a world of layered mysteries, primitive and seething with latent violence, but exquisitely beautiful.� Stephen Holden, The New York Times (WILD SIDE is presented as part of the Tournees French Film Festival) TICKET INFORMATION:2007 FINGER LAKES ENVIRONMENTAL FILM FESTIVAL HOW TO FESTIVAL Film screenings at Cinemapolis and Fall Creek require admission fees, except the HOW TO GET YOUR BREAK FLEFF FORUM, which is free and open to the public. Please remember that all events and screenings on the Ithaca College campus during the week of the festival are free and open to the public Festival 5-passes (not single tickets to individual shows) are available starting the first week of March at Cinemapolis, Fall Creek, and on the Ithaca College campus at the bookstore. Payment for festival passes and for all tickets is by check and cash only. Please note: festival tickets and passes are NOT sold on-line. Seating at all screenings is on first come, first served basis. Individual Ticket for One Screening $ 8.00 Festival Five Pass* $32.50 Student Five Pass with valid I.D.* $27.50 His People Benefit Show for 7th Art Corporation Campaign, �A Theater as Good as its Movies� $15.00, or $12.00 when you show your festival pass at point of purchase Advance tickets will be available for several premiere evening screenings and special forums downtown, including Black Gold, The Namesake, Disappearances, and His People. You can use your festival pass to secure an advance ticket to all premiere screenings and forums except for His People, which requires a separate ticket because it is a benefit. Please note that several people can share a five-pass, or one person can bring several people to one film.
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