sundance 2006 - Zoael

Sundance Thinks Globally
Top International Titles Expand the Independent Vision
THE FOLLOWING LIST WAS
compiled by Sandy Mandelberger
from the diverse international
offerings in the Premieres, Spectrum
and World Cinema competitions at
Sundance 2006.
THE AURA
(ARGENTINA, FABIAN BIELENSKY,
WORLD CINEMA DRAMA)
Director Fabian Bielensky roared onto
the international film scene with his first
film, the David Mamet-like caper film
Nine Queens, which was distributed by
Sony Pictures Classics. Bielensky is
back with another twisting thriller, The
Aura, which is having its North
American premiere at the Festival after
winning the Top Jury Prize at the
Havana International Film Festival in
December. The film is also the official
entry from Argentina in the Best
Foreign Language Film Oscar race.
After five years of economic depression,
currency devaluation and near
revolution, Argentina is slowly emerging
from its financial crisis. With the
economic turnaround has come a raft
of stories about the impotence of government,
religion and institutions to
control the fate of the people. From
this cynicism has emerged a very
smart and potent cinema, which
accents man’s vulnerability and his
continual longing for a better life.
The Aura is an engrossing existential
thriller that reunites the director
with his favorite actor Ricardo Darin, a
dour-faced everyman who handily represents
the down-and-out of their
native country who aspire to something
more. Darin, in a brilliant performance,
plays Espinoza, an introverted taxidermist
who secretly dreams of pulling off
the perfect robbery. On a hunting trip
in the Patagonian forests, his dreams
unexpectedly are made reality with
one squeeze of the trigger.
Sam Shepard in Don’t Come Knocking
Ricardo Darin in The Aura
Complicating matters is Espinoza’s
epilepsy, which hurls him into “the
aura” of utter confusion and overwhelming
disorientation, just when he
most needs to be at his sharpest. The
plot contains a number of superb
twists, as the timid taxidermist experiences
violence, fear and betrayal on
the road to the perfect crime.
DON’T COME KNOCKING
(GERMANY, WIM WENDERS,
PREMIERES)
Enjoying its world premiere at this
year’s Cannes Film Festival, the newest
film from German master director Wim
Wenders, and his first collaboration
with writer/actor Sam Shepard since
the milestone Paris, Texas, comes to
Sundance as one of the highlights of the
Premieres section.
Shepard not only wrote the screenplay
but also stars in a part that could
not be more perfect for his grizzled,
weather-beaten look. He plays Howard
17
Spence, a star of Western movies who
has seen better days. As he turns sixty,
Spence uses drugs, alcohol and young
girls to avoid the painful truth that the
best part of his life is over. After another
night of drunken debauchery on
location on yet another Western,
Howard awakens in disgust and
decides to embark on a journey that
will reunite him with his past.
His journey leads him to visit his
estranged mother (the ever-luminous
Eva Marie Saint) and eventually into the
arms of an old lover (Shepard’s partner
Jessica Lange), where he discovers that
their brief affair produced a son, a rebellious
rock musician played by up-andcomer
Gabriel Mann. Emotional fireworks
are sparked between father
and son, as each try to heal the wounds
of loss, bitterness and rejection.
Howard’s redemption may only come
with his relationship with a mysterious
young woman named Sky (played by
Sarah Polley), who also has unknown
familial ties to them all.
Wenders, who has always been fascinated
by the codes and behaviors of the
American West, embraces a more heartfelt
style in pointed contrast to his usual
detached cinema technique. Perhaps it
is the contribution of the Shepard
script, with the playwright’s great
themes of familial bonds, longing and
regret, which makes this such an emotional
and cathartic experience for all
concerned. Wenders will receive the
Lifetime Achievement Award at the
Miami International Film Festival in
March, and the film will be released later
this year by Sony Pictures Classics.
KZ (UNITED KINGDOM, REX
BLOOMSTEIN, WORLD CINEMA
DOCUMENTARY)
On the banks of the Danube River, surrounded
by picturesque mountains,
lies the fairytale town of Mauthausen.
The cobbled streets, church spires and
18th century buildings bring to mind a
quaint reflection of the old Austria.
However, less than one mile from the
town center are the remnants of one of
the most brutal concentration camps
of the Nazi era, a horrific place where
tens of thousands of people were
worked to death, tortured and murdered.
How can two such different
locations, an idyllic mountain town
and a place of horror and atrocities,
live so comfortably side by side?
That is the central theme of Rex
Bloomstein’s superb documentary KZ,
the German name for the Mauthausen
camp. Eschewing the standard
Holocaust documentary techniques of
archival footage and survivor testimonials,
Bloomstein’s film delves into a more
pressing issue; now that the eyewitness
survivors to the Nazi horrors are dying
off, how much do new generations know
of the horrors of that time and this place?
A veteran television documentarian,
Bloomstein points his nonjudgmental
camera on current residents to query
old-timers about the dark secrets of the
past, newcomers about choosing to live
there now, and tourists about their
attraction to visit such a horrific place. “I
was fascinated with the reality that this
fairytale town is part of an Austria that
has never quite owned up to its involvement
and culpability,” Bloomstein
explained. “I decided to make a film
about a day-in-the-life of a concentration
camp today, tour guides leading groups
of school children, Mauthauseners going
about their daily lives and tourists trying
to make sense of the atrocities—an
attempt to thrust the horrors of the past
into the present.” The film powerfully
makes the point of the old adage that
those who do not learn from history are
condemned to repeat it.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 18