Reel lives The Newport International Film Festival BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Real lives Over the years of previewing films for the Newport International Film Festival, I�ve become increasingly appreciative of documentaries. First of all, they are informative in a way that no print, radio, or network TV news feature can ever be. They fill in the gaps of understanding about any topic by carefully portraying, from many angles and perspectives, the people who are shaping the issue and those who are affected by it. The faces that documentaries put on the statistics stick much longer than the numbers. Documentaries can also help us experience unique cultures, whether different by ethnicity, religion, class, geography, or lifestyle. They can highlight the historical and social impact of a well-known event. They can take us behind the scenes of a little-known artist, a rising personality, or just a human being struggling to follow his or her path in life. Documentaries give us memorable stories that are by turns suspenseful, humorous, and poignant. The dramatic flow of a documentary can sometimes engage a viewer even more than a narrative feature film. Of the 20 films in the documentary category (plus the opening night documentary, Seamless) and the six in the music category at the 2005 NIFF, I screened seven. Though all presented memorable characters, four succeeded on all counts. Two of them illuminated social outreach projects, one undertaken to educate inner-city Baltimore boys (The Boys of Baraka) and the other to train women in Kabul (The Beauty Academy of Kabul). The latter covered the first group of women to graduate, under the tutelage of American, Afghan-American, and British beauticians, with certification to establish their own salons (many women had already been running them unofficially in their homes). The former followed the misadventures and successes of four boys chosen to attend the Baraka School in Kenya; it�s a heartbreaking look at the effect of broken families and drug addiction on 12-year-olds who have the guts and determination to try to escape their inevitable futures on the streets. Writer of O is another look at the author of The Story of O, who revealed her identity in 1994, but this film seems unnecessarily fixated on re-staging scenes from the book and hopelessly myopic about long-term interest in either the book or the author. The other four films are don�t-miss standouts. Two of them have a local hook � Stolen, about the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft in 1990; and Same Sex America, about the 2003 Massachusetts ruling on gay marriage. Stolen (Thursday, June 9 at 6 p.m. at the Newport Art Museum) is the joint work of Rebecca Dreyfus and her mentor, the master-documentarian Albert Maysles. Perhaps that�s why this has such polish to it: historical stills of Mrs. Gardner and her times (late 19th century/early 20th century when she was amassing her collection) spliced with romantic scenes of Venice, where some of the 13 missing paintings were acquired; Blythe Danner as Mrs. Gardner and Campbell Scott as her art dealer Bernard Berenson, reading portions of their letters; art scholars discussing the most valued painting, Vermeer�s The Concert; and the peripatetic and justly-famed art detective Harold Smith, still on the case 12 years after the theft. It�s a fascinating story that stretches from a former MFA art thief to Scotland Yard to the Irish Republican Army. Though it�s tricky to shape 18 months of the legal ups and downs on gay marriage in Massachusetts (November 2003 to July 2004) into a thoroughly engrossing, funny, and heart-tugging film, Henry Corra did so and more in Same Sex America (Thursday, June 9 at 3 p.m. at the Opera House 2 and on Friday, June 10 at 10 p.m. at the Newport Art Museum). He focuses on seven same-sex couples, six of whom are planning their weddings for shortly after May 17, 2004, when they can get their marriage licenses. It�s easy to get drawn in by the precocious young girl who models her flower girl dress for the wedding of her two dads or by the two gray-haired suburban women whose neighbors plan to attend their wedding. But Corra tackles the thorns in this issue, too: the devout Catholic woman who leads a busload of demonstrators and who vows to leave her home state if same sex marriage goes through; the state legislator who has friends who are gay couples but won�t stand up for the ruling; the parents of a gay demonstrator who are picketing on the other side. Corra makes us feel for all of them. One can only wonder what Buddy Holly would think of using a variation of one of his song titles for the teen-abstinence organization based in his Texas hometown ("True Love Waits"). Lubbock�s other claim to fame is one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the country. That stat and a healthy dose of feisty independence push 15-year-old Shelby to join the local Youth Commission to push for sex ed in the schools in Marion Lipschutz and Rose Rosenblatt�s The Education of Shelby Knox: Sex, Lies & Education (Saturday, June 11 at 9 p.m. at the Newport Art Museum, and on Sunday, June 12 at 1:30 p.m. at the Opera House). Holly�s songs twine through the film, as Shelby encounters inter-Commission politics, small-town politics, her conservative Republican parents, a confused pastor ("of course Christians are intolerant"), a hypocritical school superintendent, and a gutsy group of gay students. Surprises abound, most especially the constant loving support of Shelby�s parents � her mom even joins her during her senior year in the gay students� demonstration at the school. Press On, one of a half-dozen "music films" at NIFF this year, documents the lightning rise of Robert Randolph and the Family Band, featuring Randolph on pedal steel guitar or "sacred steel," as it�s known in the scores of Pentecostal House of God churches where Randolph got his start. Filmmaker Gillian Grisman (Grateful Dawg) covers her bases: a brief history of sacred steel playing over the past 65 years; portraits of its veteran players who mentored Randolph; his testimony that his playing saved him from crime in the New Jersey streets; the guidance of his management to land him a Warner Bros. contract; great concert footage of Randolph opening for Dave Matthews, playing with Eric Clapton, and the band at the 2004 Grammys (they were nominated for Unclassified). The screening of Press On on Thursday, June 9 at 8 p.m. at the Jane Pickens will be followed by a live performance by "sacred steel" greats Ted Beard and Calvin Cooke. � Johnette Rodriguez

Although Hollywood taught Europeans how to make movies, contemporary American independent filmmakers have, by and large, learned their craft and aspirations from watching foreign films. The lessons have been fundamental: keep the pace leisurely when you want the viewer to slow down and pay attention; go for character above plot, if you want your story to stick with the moviegoer afterward, past the lobby conversation.

At this year�s Newport International Film Festival, half of the eight narrative features in competition are foreign films. The first two of the films sampled below are vying for awards, and the others are out of competition, in the Contemporary World Cinema category. All of them are enjoyable as well as informative about the different ways that a good film can work.

Le Grand Voyage (2004, France/Morocco, 1:48)

Friday, June 10 at noon at the Opera House II and on Saturday, June 11 at 3:30 p.m. at the Opera House I

This story could not be farther from the American preference for road films full of clever banter and male bonding. Reda (Nicholas Cazale) is ordered by his formidably strict father (Mohamed Majd) to drop his studies, despite final exams approaching, and drive him from France to Mecca. As a good Muslim, the old man must make the pilgrimage before he dies. Starting with throwing away a cell phone, which nonbeliever Reda took to sneak calls to his non-Muslim girlfriend, what follows is 3000 miles of stifled outrage and painful, picaresque incidents � a Bulgarian peasant woman who won�t leave their car; a Turk who might be a saint, might be a scalawag; the inevitable hospital emergency.

Many days into the ordeal, Reda asks why the haj is so important to him. Since this is the first time his son has expressed any interest in the old man�s reasons, the father softens, though just a bit. Briefly, matter-of-factly, he explains, amused that the question has been so long in coming. The scene is over almost as soon as it began, and only afterwards do we realize that it is the film�s raison d��tre. This affecting but unsentimental film is a lesson in economical cinematic storytelling. It doesn�t waste our time on unnecessary transitions and certainly not on instructing us how to respond.

Cronicas (2004, Mexico/Equador, 1:48)

Wednesday, June 8 at 8:30 p.m. at the Opera House II and on Thursday, June 9 at 1:30 p.m. at the Opera House I

John Leguizamo is Manolo Bonilla, an aggressive Miami tabloid television reporter in Mexico on the trail of a serial rapist and killer of children. The first person we see is the only candidate for the crimes. In an eerie opening, his head fills the screen emerging from water, interrupting our peaceful view of a spreading tree of life in the middle distance. But was the incriminating evidence in his pickup truck left by a hitchhiker, the guilt-burdened killer who confessed details to him, as he insists? Particularly compelling is the first half-hour, in which a fatal traffic accident results in escalating violence that drops the story into the reporter�s lap. Leguizamo�s force of personality compels empathy, if not sympathy, with the ethically troubled Borilla.

Cronicas was produced by the makers of Y tu mam� tambi�n and written and directed by Sebastian Cordero, the Ecuadoran filmmaker whose Ratas, Ratones, Rateros was a multi-award-winning festival hit in 1998.

The World (Shi Jie) (2004, China/Japan/ France, 2:20)

Wednesday, June 8 at 3:30 p.m. at the Opera House I

One of the main things to commend this film for is that it didn�t take the easy route � rather than dwelling on the colorful kitsch opportunities, it uses them in passing, for ironic contrast. The World is a Beijing theme park that brings exotic foreign sights such as a one-third-scale Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and miniature Twin Towers to a poor and travel-restricted population. In this slice-of-life excursion, the main people we follow are Tao (Zhao Tao), a chorus girl, and her park guard boyfriend, Taisheng (Chen Taishen). Director Jia Zhang-Ke has become popular in the West for spurning exotic period opportunities such as My Concubine, choosing instead to show the conflicts of mainland Chinese in a globalized world.

Young villagers have come to the big city with big aspirations, as they do everywhere else in the world. We witness their disappointments on the job, in their love lives and back home where they visit friends to relieve their loneliness. Keeping their self-respect is as hard as rising above their equally unskilled coworkers in this pretend world. And for a beautiful young woman like Tao, prostitution is a tempting shortcut to the good life. Avoiding beguiling us with intimate close-ups, the director stands back and shows how the personal scales up to universal, starting with a showgirl�s backstage opening Band-Aid quest, which mere duration skillfully makes epic.

The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2004, France, 1:47)

Friday, June 10 at 10 p.m. at the Opera House

This is a remake of the 1978 noir sleeper Fingers and its unlikely premise, in which Harvey Keitel played a mob enforcer torn between his day job and classical music. In this update, director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips) gets a compelling performance from Romain Duris as Tom Seyr, a 28-year-old baseball-bat-wielder for his sleazy father, a real estate wheeler-dealer. Ten years before, Tom turned his back on a promising career as a concert pianist, which his mother was when she died. When he comes across her former manager, who forcefully encourages him to audition, he�s buoyed by a glimpse away from his dark side. For weeks he practices daily, tutored by a beautiful young Chinese immigrant (Linh-Dan Pham) who can communicate with him only in gestures and music.

The potential danger of this sort of story arc is a facile happy ending. But since this film is brought to us by the darkest interpreters of existentialism, we�ve nothing to worry about. Death, revenge, and other violent passions combine to ground this story and its ending in a bleakly recognizable world. Its concluding affirmation is well-earned.

FEST FACTS

Last year five of the selections at the Newport International Film Festival went on to receive Academy Award nominations, and this year�s eighth annual selections have similar ambitions.

From June 7 to 12, 14 narrative features will be screened, including the closing night film that will see wide distribution, and five recent films from other countries that have already earned attention.

Six documentaries on music and musicians will be shown, ranging in focus from Townes Van Zandt to AfroReggae music in the slums of Rio to a chronicle of the hijinks of the Holy Modal Rounders. (A live performance by Peter Stampfel will follow the screening on June 10.) Along with the music-on-film programming, the annual Claiborne Pell Award for Lifetime Achievement will be presented to musician and actor Michael McKean, known best from This Is Spinal Tap, which will be shown during the festival in the retrospective category that also features films by Christopher Guest. McKean will be joined in a special acoustic performance by Guest and Harry Shearer.

Also screened will be 20 documentaries, 12 animations and three dozen shorts, plus four features and 26 shorts specifically for children.

Festivalgoers can see the documentary Ellen Kuras Master Class: The Art of Cinematography and attend a panel discussion with its subject. Kuras has directed the photography of such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Analyze That, and I Shot Andy Warhol.

The opening night film will be Seamless, directed by Douglas Keeve, who last presented flamboyant designer Isaac Mizrahi in Unzipped. This documentary goes behind the scenes and into the personal life of young fashion designers competing for prominence and a $200,000 prize. Closing out the festival will be The Beautiful Country, directed by Hans Petter Moland. The story tells the saga of a half-American Vietnamese boy named Binh who struggles to make his way to the United States to find his estranged father, played by Nick Nolte.

Most of the six panels and discussion programs will be held at the Newport Blues Caf�. The programming includes a screenplay reading, a discussion of music in film and a closing afternoon discussion with local filmmakers, producers and distributors about filming on location in Rhode Island. Open-call screenings of 15-minute excerpts from Rhode Island filmmaker will be shown on the last evening of the festival.

Tickets for most films and panels are $10, children half-price for children�s films. Most screenings will be at the Opera House and the adjacent Jane Pickens Theater. For details and ticket purchases, go to www.newportfilmfestival.com.