In January the Alamo Drafthouse made this dream possible for the kids in our AFS Film Club program.  Students, parents, AISD staff and community partners attended our first ever Film Club Winter Festival at the Alamo South Lamar.  Films from all our afterschool filmmaking workshops – 14 AISD campuses in total – showcased the best projects created during the Fall 2011 semester.  From documentaries and claymation, the students got to see their hard work projected large on the big screen.

The schools participating in the program were: Harris, Barrington, Winn, Widen, Rodriguez and Pecan Springs Elementaries; Mendez, Martin, Pearce, Fulmore and Dobie Middle Schools; and Travis, East Side and Reagan High Schools.  We began the program with the films from our Elementary Schools and then progressed through to the High School level.  A genre-bending “scar-com” from Winn Elementary called GHOST IN THE CLASSROOM got the ball rolling, with the audience enjoying boxes of popcorn till the celebratory documentary-style film from Reagan High School called EXPRESS YOURSELF finished off the event.  Other highlights included the Charlie Chaplin-style short from Pecan Springs Elementary called THE SLEEPWALKER, a Halloween themed stopmotion entitled MURDER CORD from Fulmore Middle School, and a timely public service announcement from Travis High School regarding people who answer their phones during class.

The Winter Festival was not only a chance to bring all the Film Club students under one roof to experience the joy of cinema, but to share the fun with the AISD and community leaders who work hard to make these types of afterschool programs possible.  These individuals, such as our AISD partners ACE Afterschool and our long-time sponsors, don’t always get the chance to see first-hand the amazing projects the kids create and the personal growth they go through.  We, the instructors, see it everyday in class, but we wanted to share the experience with the folks that work behind-the-scenes.  (Did I mention that AISD generously chartered three yellow school buses with students and parents to the Festival screening!)

While this event was primarily a celebration of the AFS Film Club and the amazing students that take part in the program, it also served as an excellent teaching tool for the spring semester.  There’s nothing better to inspire a filmmaker than viewing the work of his or her peers, especially a young filmmaker.  Since Film Club instruction takes place on AISD campuses, it can be difficult to demonstrate to our students the full breadth and width of what you can do with filmmaking technology. We have a limited time with the students and spend much of the instruction period working on the tools and techniques of filmmaking, not screening multiple works.  Additionally,

there’s nothing like a well-shot film to reaffirm why you need to hold a camera steady (a hard concept for a 4^th grader!) or the purpose of a close-up shot (again, a complex idea).  As teachers, we can take the Winter Festival and use it in class reflections, and most importantly for motivation.  “What was your favorite film?” “Why did you like it?” ”Would you like to make a movie like that?!”

Whether your take-away was a renewed love of filmmaking or just an appreciation of the collective movie going experience, our audience at the Film Club Winter Festival seemed to have a great time. And, the Alamo Drafthouse capped off the event by announcing a No Talking PSA competition for our students in the spring semester.  We couldn’t be more excited!

Once last time: Thank you to our AFS Filmmaking Mentors, the Alamo Drafthouse, AISD ACE Afterschool, Time Warner Cable’s Connect A Million Minds, Applied Materials and all our sponsors and community partners that made this possible. Can’t wait see you all at the Spring Festival! Make sure to check out our YouTube channel to see the films screened at the event.

One of the perennial and most fruitful subjects of cinema is relationships, especially those of married couples. Regardless of ethnicity, religion, class, location, or gender, most couples will have problems – sometimes insoluble ones where the regrettable solution seems to be separation, divorce, or disappearance. Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s protagonists, Nader and Simin, have reached such an impasse. After 14 years of marriage, Simin wants to take their 13-year-old daughter and emigrate to another country with or without her husband, to a place where she and Termeh can seek greater opportunities as women. Besides being satisfied with his job and social position already, Nader has to take care of his incapacitated father and consequently refuses to leave Iran. In hopes of making her parents try once more to live together, Termeh refuses to join her mother, who definitely will not leave Iran without her daughter. Thus, they have reached an impasse, which could be replicated within practically any country, especially for the “Sandwich Generation” which finds itself taking care of both school-age children and elderly parents. Thus, A SEPARATION is a global film which can speak to all audiences.

However, when Simin secures a woman to come clean the house and watch after the elderly, usually bed-ridden father with Alzheimer’s, then aspects of Islamic culture become critical to the story and create all manner of unfamiliar but haunting conflicts and complications. Razieh is a very honorable, religious woman and, if she is to take this caretaker job, must be assured she will not be alone in the same apartment with Nader. This is an Islamic prohibition against unrelated men and women being alone together. Similarly, Americans of my generation can remember nosey landladies and strict hotelkeepers being similar guardians of morality as late as the 1970s. But so long as Razieh might bring along a female relative (in addition to her daughter), she feels somewhat OK about taking the job, even though she feels the pay is too low and her bus-commute is so long. However, it is the actions of another male, the elderly, senile father, which cause Razieh more complex problems, the first of which necessitates a phone call to a religious official to see what is a permissible solution. Once that is all cleared up, it seems that order could be brought back into the house, even with Simin gone.

But Razieh has withheld or minimized information about several aspects of her own marital and physical condition. By not clarifying and restating all situations – perhaps she is too shy or ashamed to do so – she sets the stage for a descent into disaster, which eventually endangers several families and numerous individuals. These conflicts and confusion put into sharp relief the still existing class system within Iran – one based primarily on education as well as family background, it would seem.

The contrast between the two women, Simin and Razieh, is illuminating as Simin has no problem expressing herself with her husband and initiates the separation. Razieh, on the other hand, takes the job without telling her husband. She needs to bring in some money since Hodjat has numerous debts for which he has even gone to prison from time to time. Debtors’ prison appears to be alive and well in Iran, just as in Dickens’ nineteenth-century Britain. The two husbands, Nader and Hodjat, though quite different because of their jobs and class, are quite similar in having violent tempers, which get both into great difficulties.

Farhadi does seem inspired by women in Iran today. In several interviews he has stated: “Currently, in Iran, it is the women who are struggling most in an attempt to recover the rights they have been deprived of. They are at once more resistant and more determined. Western audiences often have a very fragmented image of the Iranian woman, whom they see as being passive, homebound, far from any kind of social activity. Perhaps a certain number of women in Iran do live like that, but for the most part women are highly present and active in society, and in a much more forthright manner than men, despite the restrictions they are subjected to. Both kinds of women are present in the film, without either being condemned or proclaimed a heroine. The confrontation between these two women is not that of good versus bad. They are simply two clashing visions of good. And that is where, in my opinion, modern tragedy resides. Conflict sparks between two positive entities, and what I hope is that the viewer will not know whose victory to wish for.”

With such subjects, at times A SEPARATION seems like a John Cassavetes domestic drama, such as A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) or FACES (1968). Even the camera style is reminiscent of the American independent master filmmaker – sometimes agonizingly close-up framing of the characters, coupled with a handheld, frenetic camera chasing the action. We are truly there and can’t help but be fascinated, even to the point of wanting to intrude, but never to escape.  The setting of the apartment is perfect with windows looking across the way to other rooms, so that though visible to one another, the protagonists are often separated by glass barriers, reminiscent of Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s framing style, which entrapped or divided characters. Farhadi is in that way a modernist director fully aware of the power of composition, distance, and movement, always pleasurable in cinema, new or classic.

This film is blessed with the presence of fine actors, four of whom unprecedentedly received Silver Bear awards for “Best Performances” at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2011. Leilah Hatami (Simin) brings a quiet grace and elegance to her role as the almost-feminist wife. Hatami grew up in an artistic home with her father (a veteran film director) and her mother (an actress). After living in Switzerland for a while, she returned to her homeland and first gained international attention for playing the title role in LEILA (1998, shown by AFS some years ago in an Iranian series). Peyman Maadi, who plays the husband Nader, has written more screenplays (5) than acted in films (2), but he perfectly embodies the angry, hurt, confused male, while steering clear of the stereotypical role of a roughshod patriarch. Sareh Bayat completely stole my heart with her performance as the shy, well-meaning, but unworldly Razieh, who is simply trying to keep her own family together while observing all the strict rules of Islamic morality. Bayat has had extensive theatrical training and experience, which gave her the ability to take such a role full of nuances and painful silences. Razieh’s mercurial husband, Hodjat, is explosively performed by Shahab Hosseini, who interestingly had considered emigrating to Canada, but took a job on radio, which led to TV and film work. The 13-year-old Termeh is played by Farhadi’s actual daughter, Sarina, who gave the director more problems than any of the other actors – not because she couldn’t play the part after being in several other films, but because she continually asked, “Why do I say that? Why do I do that” – in the most challenging and irritating manner of 1950s American method actors. But the father is obviously proud of his daughter and is helping her find her own path through self-expression.

On selecting and working with his cast, Farhadi reveals in an interview with Emanuel Levy: “I usually take a long time to choose the actors, and this was no exception. I tend to avoid embarrassing actors with general considerations on the film, or my vision of it. I feel the actor doesn’t need the global meaning of the film, but must strive to concentrate on his own character’s definition and intentions. My method, in fact, is to adapt to each actor, his or her way of being and doing. But what is constant is the importance of rehearsing. This is when the actors become their characters. Which means that during the shoot, we can concentrate on details, as the outline is already there. We took our time to rehearse, working from a very detailed screenplay, which we followed precisely, to enable each actor to understand the different dimensions of their character. This approach may very well come from my experience with the theater. It doesn’t mean propositions or opinions are forbidden, but we agreed that rehearsals were the only place to discuss. Once we started shooting, we agreed that variations would be minimal.”

The writer/director Asghar Farhadi is no stranger to AFS audiences. We showed his delightful FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY (2006) during an earlier Essential Cinema series of films from the Middle East. That film dealt with a younger domestic servant caught in between the outdoor/indoor fireworks of a national celebration and a middle class couple splitting apart because of suspicions of marital infidelity (not an issue in A SEPARATION). Although not yet 40, Farhadi has had extensive film experience –starting at age 14 with small format films. His studies in stage direction have paid off with his ability to elicit such subtly powerful performances from his fine cast. With A SEPARATION Farhadi has won 44 international awards (to date), including, of  course, a Golden Bear from Berlin and “Best Foreign Language” film at the recent Golden Globes. As if it can’t be stopped, A SEPARATION has been nominated for the upcoming Academy Awards: “Best Foreign Language Film” and “Best Writing, Original Screenplay” [a ground-breaking non-English-language choice in that category, if I am not mistaken]. What an amazing moment that might be if Farhadi gets to appear on the Kodak stage of the Oscar ceremonies in this year of saber rattling from and against Iran. Ah, if only artists of all the arts were in charge of governments, perhaps ….

In conclusion, Farhadi has purposely left his film without one. He states very intriguingly and provokingly: “I don’t think it’s important for the audience to know my intention. I’d rather they left the cinema with questions. I believe that the world today needs more questions than answers. Answers prevent you from questioning, from thinking. From the opening scene, I aimed to set this up. The film’s first question is whether an Iranian child has a better future in his or her own country or abroad. There is no set answer. My wish is that this film will make you ask yourselves questions, such as these ones.”

Asghar Farhadi clearly intends to stay and work in Iran. It’s a brave, difficult choice in a land which has imprisoned and/or silenced wonderful directors like Jafar Panahi and Mohammad Rasoulof or which has seen the world-class Abbas Kiarostami finally emigrate to France. This particular chapter in Iranian history is not yet complete, so I’m glad that a humanist like Farhadi will participate in its creation. — Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society

Interviews with Asghar Farhadi
Sam Adams, AV Club, 30 December 2011
Saeed Kamali Dehghan, The Guardian, 15 July 2011
Emanuel Levy website

Violet Crown Cinema (434 W. 2^nd St)
Opening Friday 10 February (various times)
Check Violet Crown Cinema website for showtimes
For $2 discount for any showing of A SEPARATION, AFS members may call
512-495-9600 and reserve seats (advisable) or go to theater with AFS card in
hand.
No tickets available through AFS.

This afternoon we went up to Olympic Park to watch our friends’ daughter practice her aerials. I cannot believe people do that willingly, but it’s beautiful to watch.

We made it to our 5:15p screening of Red Lights (we liked most of it, but not the resolution) and then walked back to the house to visit with friends until the award winners were announced.

Turns out I saw the World Cinema award winner last night (Violeta Goes to Heaven) so I won’t need the two tickets I bought for the winner tomorrow. I don’t have a ticket for the Dramatic Grand Prize winner at 9:45p (Beasts of the Southern Wild), but I grab my flashlight and head for the Eccles Theater. After selling my World Cinema winner tickets to folks waiting in line, I dash to the wait list line where I am number 145 or some such terrible place. Then a fellow walks in with an extra ticket to sell, and suddenly I am scrambling into the theater for the screening. The director and crew and star are still in town for the Q & A, and the film is quite good.

To top off my good luck, a shuttle picked me up out back and dropped me off at the end of my street instead of the regular stop farther off. I didn’t fall on the ice. Hooray! Now it’s midnight, and first thing tomorrow, we will head for home. It’s been a fun week. Thanks for letting me share it with you!

While waiting to see the Czech film “Four Suns” this morning at 8:30, I read the Variety review by Justin Chang of “Safety Not Guaranteed” starring Mark Duplass. Turns out Justin loved it, too.

He calls it “a small movie with a big heart,” an “oddball comedy about love as the ultimate risky adventure.” Other phrases I appreciated include “kooky premise,” “endearingly scrappy,” “fast and funny rhythm,” and “exhilarating finale.”

Gee, wish I’d said that!

I’m off to my ninth film this afternoon. It’s started to snow again. Watching a good film with 486 new friends at the Library is definitely the place to be.

19-year-old Laura Halilovic has made a completely charming documentary about her Romani family and her own interests and dreams. With her behind the camera and guided by her delightful narration, we get fascinating conversations with her mother(who wants Laura to get married), her father (who wants Laura to get married), and her grandmother (who wants Laura to get married). A friendly family even brings in their son to ask for Laura’s hand in marriage, but she stays in her bedroom and makes it abundantly clear that she doesn’t want to marry yet. Instead, as she documents the lives of those around her, we are taken more deeply into the situation of Romani in Italy today. Although Laura and her immediate family live comfortably in a nice apartment,
keep the children in school, and have settled in with their Gadjo (non-Gypsy) neighbors, much of the rest of the family lives in encampments. One of her uncles has even bought the land on which 60 members of the extended family (clan?) live in mobile homes. Even so, the nearby Gadjo get the city council to issue eviction notices to throw them off their own property. We never know if zoning laws are being broken, but it all seems quite unfair, especially since the land is between the city dump and the dog pound. An Italian lawyer seems to be of little help. There is some very tragic news footage of Romani camps being attacked and burned to the ground in the present, providing an eerie echo of the past, when the Nazi hatred of Romani in the 1930s and 1940s drove “Gypsies” to the death camps along with Jews, homosexuals, Communists, and others who didn’t “fit” into the “ideal” Nazi community. With the resurgence of right-wing anti-Semitism and the new Islamophobia in Europe, perhaps it is no coincidence that attacks on Romani settlements are taking place.

But not only does Laura reveal social problems, she also admits to a lifelong fascination with Woody Allen. Please reread that sentence and then continue…. Like a starstruck fan of days gone by, she even writes him a letter (content unknown). Her anguish over the appropriate way to begin the letter is charming. Interspersed with serious topics throughout the film are shots of Laura (the camera) approaching the mailbox, only to find nothing inside, not even a bill. Then one day she announces that she and another young woman are traveling to some other city. Why? We don’t know until suddenly we see George Clooney and a very familiar face to which she can’t attach a name (Brad Pitt)walking on a red carpet. Then wonder of wonders, there is Woody Allen (with Soon-Yi, but Laura doesn’t take notice of her). The young fan yells out to Woody (probably the only one to do so when Clooney and Pitt are around), and he actually comes over to Laura. She asks him to sign his autograph, which he obligingly does and then walks away – with her pen. We learn that he is the reason she wants to become a film director and not yet get married. So, we can thank Woody Allen for being the voice of Z in ANTZ (Laura’s first encounter with him) and for inspiring a young Romani woman to make her first movie. The very least I can do is add the title of her film to Woody’s IMDB filmography, where he appears as “Himself.” Hopefully one of his assistants will see his new film credit and write Laura a letter of thanks (and send her a new pen).

[Note: I watched this documentary in preparation for the new AFS Essential Cinema series focused on Cinema of Southeast Europe, which we will present in April and May this year, with the assistance and attendance of Vera Mijojlic, a great friend and generous director of the Southeast European Film Festival of Los Angeles. Judging from this documentary, the first of 30-40 films sent to me by Vera, I am going to learn a lot and have a good time making hard choices]. – Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society

Seeing a movie at 8:30 in the morning requires a certain level of commitment. It’s mostly a mature audience, with a contingent of younger people, bleary-eyed from last night’s parties. And the audience took these characters to heart right away, erupting in a spontaneous outburst of emotion toward the end.

I didn’t know Aubrey Plaza before this film, but she’s someone I want to see again.

The screening was preceded by an unforgettable Australian short by Nash Edgerton called Bear. Its eleven minutes pack in a lot of drama and the kind of Pulp Fiction humor that makes you gasp before laughing. He said he has a feature film under his belt which no one saw. It’s called The Square and I immediately added it to my Netflix queue.

Editor’s Note: Vicki Vogel is a Member of the Austin Film Society. She and her husband David regularly attend the Park City fest.

Annie is played by 11-year-old Sydney Aguirre. Eleven years old? Are you kidding me? This little girl blew me away. She is so completely natural, and her face is so expressive. You ache for her in her situation, yet nothing is sentimentalized.

When the film ended, the applause was not overwhelming. “Oh, no!” I thought. “They didn’t like it.” From the questions at the Q & A, however, I realized they were just kind of stunned and processing what they had seen. Why did she? Who was? And then what happened? A little girl in the audience was full of appropriate questions.

On the shuttle bus, small knots of people were discussing the film, including me and my husband. It’s a film I’ll think about tomorrow, and the next day. What more can you ask?

Editor’s Note: Vicki Vogel is a Member of the Austin Film Society. She and her husband David regularly attend the Park City fest.

The event itself was great.  The topic, “An Insider Guide to the SXSW Film Festival”, was a how-to for independent filmmakers to submit their films to film festivals, a really exciting and useful subject for budding filmmakers from two big hitters on the festival scene.  The event was well attended and informative, and Pierson and Godfrey gave some great advice to the attentive audience.  A couple of the take-home points were that your film is right for some festivals, but it’s not right for all of them.  Know your film and where it fits, and then plan which festivals you will submit your film to and budget for them before you even enter production.

Prior to the moviemaker dialogue, I had seen the streaming technology used only a couple other times, but this event marked my first time to use the equipment entirely on my own.  I arrived an hour before to set up the equipment.  The pack consists of a hard-shell, fairly lightweight backpack with battery pack and touchscreen computer monitor, which connects to your camera using an a/v composite cord.

The way this works is by connecting your camera’s audio/video feed to the streaming kit, which is connected to a wireless network.  The audio/video information is encoded in real time by the kit’s computer and sent over the network to a specific URL address in the form of IP (internet protocol) packets.  The packets are then decoded on the user end and show up as a live video stream.

We were using a 4G wireless Clear Spot to connect the device to the web and had a strong signal, but I was still unable to successfully start the encoding.  The people waiting on their computers at home to test the feed were unable to view the event, and I wasn’t equipped at the time to troubleshoot the issues we were having.  Two of the main problems included identifying interference from a nearby computer logged onto the feed’s URL and, as I learned later, an incorrectly entered password for the encoding.

I have had the opportunity to use the technology a few times since with greater success.  Still, many of the nuances and ticks of live Internet broadcasting are currently beyond my knowledge base and that of the general public, and this technology is still in sort of an adolescent stage.  I want to start with the benefits of the technology, and then talk about some of the current limitations.

The pack is lightweight, compact and portable and does not require a wired connection or external power source like other types of live streaming devices.  This makes the product highly mobile and great for work in the field or at big events.  In addition, the interface is fairly easy to use, so a one or two person crew can operate the equipment with excellent results.  The feed can reach a large targeted audience from anywhere in the world if people cannot make it to the actual event.  This has the potential to broaden membership for an organization such as the Austin Film Society because people could benefit from our great speakers and programing even if they are located outside of Austin.  The pack also connects directly to a dedicated URL, which can then be embedded into your own website for a streamlined look.  The technology is continually improving and even expanding to multiple devices at different price points, including tablets with built-in cameras.

As far as limitations, the equipment requires a level of experience to troubleshoot and stream at the highest quality.  The streamer has to have good knowledge of Internet broadcasting requirements, including bandwidth needs.  This being an independent company with limited bandwidth, it could become an issue, as users have come to expect a high-level of video quality on their computers.  Wireless signal can also be unreliable.  I lost the feed at some point during the wedding ceremony I streamed when I hit a weak connection and had to deal with the fallout of unhappy viewers.  And on the other end, user compliance and high-speed connections are needed to optimize the experience.  All Internet browsers do not yet support this technology and some browsers require certain plug-ins to be downloaded, which requires a level of sophistication by the viewers.

All that being said, I was able to go from no broadcasting experience at all to streaming an event for an audience of over a thousand people in just a few short months, which speaks wonders for the ease of use of this product.  Working with this new equipment has been a great learning experience, and this is clearly a technology that has potentially huge implications for the future of broadcasting.