The Frontier

Louisiana—

Although oil has finally stopped spewing into the Gulf of Mexico, work continues on The Frontier, a poetic documentary portrait of coastal Louisiana, one of the most beautiful, ecologically diverse and productive regions in America. In an attempt to create a picture of what it’s like to live on the margins of this vast, but vanishing edge of the country, The Frontier follows a charismatic cast of characters trying to make ends meet—some of the participants include a shrimper and bartender on Grand Isle, a swamp guide in Iberia Parish, and a 15 year-old high school student in Chauvin.

The film is being produced and directed by Jeremy Craig, graduate of the Columbia University film program whose most recent short film, Terrebonne, was scored by members of the four-time Grammy-nominated band, The Fray, and was funded through grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Louisiana Film Foundation and Kodak.
The Frontier was in pre-production when the Deepwater Horizon exploded, an event that Craig and associate producer Julie Engebretson are hesitant to discuss too closely in relation to the project. “Although the catastrophe will be addressed in the film, The Frontier was never meant to be about the oil spill,” said Engebretson. “Oil and natural gas, however, are a huge part of the culture of Louisiana and any honest portrait of the region has to include it in some way.” So, as many journalists, activists, and media personnel begin their slow withdrawal from the region, work on The Frontier continues uninterrupted. Having begun in late April, filming on The Frontier will be a yearlong process that is expected to conclude at the start of the next fishing season in May 2011.

Through strategic support from the Gulf Restoration Network, America’s Wetland Foundation, and the Louisiana Film Foundation, Craig has been able to get access to many prominent Louisianans, including Thomas Dardar, Jr. Tribal Chief of the United Houma Nation, Chris D’Elia, Dean of the LSU School of Coast and Environment, and Mike Tidwell, author of the classic, Bayou arewell. The Frontier crew is small—joining Craig and Engebretson are co-producer Jillian Schlesinger, associate producer, Christopher Brown, and director of photography, Gregory Kershaw. “That we’re ostensibly invisible gives us much more flexibility,” said Craig, who prefers having a small crew to a large one any day. “Being free and mobile comes in handy when you’re filming in extreme conditions and strange, sometimes tight, locations. Most importantly, it makes deciding where to eat lunch a lot easier.”

Subsidizing the first few production periods through small grants, The Frontier team is now funding the rest of the project on the run. Beginning today, Craig and company are in the midst of a critically important 35-day fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.com, a final push to raise the $12,000 needed to get them through the rest of production. “It’s a ton of money,” said Craig. “But I’m cautiously optimistic.”

Recently featured in the New York Times, NPR and Wired, Kickstarter is an innovative, crowdsourcing way to fund creative ventures based on donor rewards and an all-or-nothing model where projects must be fully funded before any money is exchanged. “We’ve tried to offer donors the best incentives possible because there’s a lot riding on this campaign,” said Engebretson. “There’s no back up plan.” Having formed partnerships with a number of eco-friendly companies and artists, donor perks include productions from Klean Kanteen, Ecobags, Defend the Coast T=shirts, Heads of State, Dakine, Colcasac, Union Square Café, and even a bit of Craig’s own swag—DVDs of Terrebonne and signed copies of his 2009 young adult novel, The Straits. On top of donor incentives, one percent of all the money raised by The Frontier team will be donated toward 1% For the Planet.

In addition to The Frontier, Craig is also collaborating with longtime friend and lifestyle photographer, Bryan Johnson, on a related photography essay project suitably titled The Coastal Frontier. Developing as a gallery exhibit and web archive, The Coastal Frontier aims to capture the region in a more curated and expressionistic way.

In a statement describing The Coastal Frontier, Craig writes that the photography project “not only records this transitional moment in Louisiana history, but recreates one as well. It is both a timely document of the here and now and a timeless restoration of a way of life in the bayou and on the great trembling prairies of southernmost Louisiana, one that nostalgically celebrates that old school bus in the sugarcane field, the fisherman up at dawn, the boarded up gas station, and the oyster bucket on the sun-turned wharf.”

Craig and his collaborators hope both The Frontier and The Coastal Frontier not only raise awareness about the environmental threats to Louisiana but also “reveal the dynamic relationship between the Cajun people and their coastal place—all in search of a purposeful design in this place that is both paradise and paradise lost.” With so many different but interrelated projects happening simultaneously, how does Craig keep them all straight? “I don’t,” he says with a smile. “But don’t tell anyone.”

To support The Frontier or learn more about the project, you can visit www.thefrontierfilm.com.

You can find out more about The Coastal Frontier at www.coastalfrontier.com and his short film, Terrebonne, at www.terrebonnefilm.com. For interviews, additional photos, or general questions, please feel free to contact us at info @thefrontierfilm.com or jeremy@thefrontierfilm.com.

Cigarette Candy

Mike Fishman of Ourspacemovieblog sat down recently with director Lauren Wolkstein (MFA Degree in Film, Columbia University) and producer Brigitte Liebowitz (MFA Degree in Film, Columbia University) to discuss their SXSW award-winning short film, Cigarette Candy. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Synopsis: Forced to play the role of “the hero” at his homecoming party, traumatized teenage Marine (Eddie) forms an unlikely bond with a rebellious young girl (Candy). Visit the official website: http://www.cigarettecandy.com/

Mike Fishman (MF): I’d like to start by asking you about the genesis of the project. Lauren, your father is a Colonel in the Air Force but (fellow Columbia University film student) Jeff Sousa wrote the script.

Lauren Wolkstein (LW): I wanted to make a film about coming home, that’s the type of story I know and am drawn to. Since I’m not in the military, the way I’m involved is by seeing my father come home, and my friends coming home, from Iraq and Afghanistan on different tours of duty, and I felt the need to tell that type of story. Jeff and I were on a writing retreat in Maine with (Columbia University Film Professor) Lewis Cole (facebook dedication page) and I pitched Cigarette Candy. Jeff had some amazing ideas that we bounced off each other, and he said he’d like to work with me and that’s basically how it happened. I was struggling with the material because I felt like it was too personal to me, too close, and I really wanted to take it outside of what I had experienced to make it something universal, and Jeff was as passionate as I was about telling this story.

MF: Did you at that time already have the idea of a Marine coming home who had accidentally shot and paralyzed his commanding officer?

LW: That came a little later. When I originally pitched it, it was a different story. It was a ghost story about this girl, Candy, who was the main character.

Brigitte Liebowitz (BL): It took place in an abandoned house and someone close to her who had been a soldier had passed away and was haunting her.

LW: I originally wanted to make a film with a Southern Gothic aesthetic, but the story ended up being very different, much more realistic and corporeal because we felt that was the best way to tell a truthful rendition of this type of story. So, I am glad we changed the tone and made the main character Eddie. We went through many drafts of the story, and we finally boiled it down to this one event, this one incident, the party.

BL: It was always a coming home story, there was always this element of someone being haunted by war, by trauma.

LW: It was always that general idea because that’s been haunting me. The very first film I made at Columbia was about a 10-year-old girl whose father comes home from war. That was very autobiographical. The girl accidentally pops a balloon that is at her father’s coming home party, and the father reacts to the balloon popping as if it was a bomb going off. My father experienced that. I was drawn to telling the story of a loved one coming home changed and how that affects everyone, not just the person coming home. I also like coming-of-age stories, so we decided on the idea of this guy who’s not yet a man but who’s forced to be a man because of the situation. I think that’s a big problem now, there’s a lot of people going off to war and they’re not ready to be adults, so there’s this line between “am I a boy or am I a man now?”

BL: And Candy is his foil, she’s rebelling against that. We had a lot of back story for her that didn’t make it into the film about the fact that her father is in the military and so she, in her own way, was forced to grow up too quickly as well. She and Eddie are two sides of the same coin, he was in the war and she’s trying to play the “grown-up.” She lost her childhood, which doesn’t really seem to be valued much anymore anyway, it’s all about how grown-up can you be, how sexy can you be?

LW: We all know people like that type of girl, she’s over-sexualized and is forcing herself to grow up too soon. So she and Eddie are kindred spirits in that way. Candy is actually very much like the soldiers.

MF: Which brings us to the title, Cigarette Candy; her name is Candy, she’s a bit of a Lolita, and there’s quite a bit of smoking throughout which represents so many different things: rebellion, adulthood.

BL: It’s a mask for her, a veil.

LW: Before I even started writing the story I had in mind the photograph by Sally Mann called Candy Cigarette. It is a picture of her 13-year-old daughter looking very sexualized holding a (candy) cigarette. That image stuck with me, as did this other haunting photograph by LA Times photographer Luis Sinco called Marlboro Marine, which is an iconic image of a Marine who has dirt all over his face, a helmet on and is smoking a cigarette. So these two photographs kind of told the whole story. These are the two central images that I always carried with me when we were shooting.

BL: The central image was part of Lewis Cole’s curriculum for developing story which has since been a tool I use when working with writers and director to develop material.

LW: You can get so lost in all these drafts you write that you can forget what it’s really about, and what Lewis taught was to always keep in mind that image you had in your head when you first set out to write it.

BL: Those images serve as your beacon.

LW: Those two images are so evocative, they’re really like portraits of wounded people. That’s really where the story came from.

MF: There are several evocative moments in the film, one when Eddie steps out of the house towards the party; he’s going from dark to light, as a soldier might go out –

LW: Onto a battlefield? Exactly. We called that the “thrown to the wolves” scene.

BL: Right, or like a gladiator.

LW: It’s supposed to evoke that feeling of floating through a space that you don’t want to be a part of yet you’re forced into. In a lot of ways he’s being thrown to the wolves, forced into battle with these people he can’t connect with.

MF: He can’t relate to anyone except for Candy, although when they’re having sex he can’t look her in the eye.

LW: He’s zoning out (when they’re having sex). He doesn’t really connect with her until the end. You feel like he’s searching for something but in that moment he’s just trying to escape the party, she’s an easy target so to speak.

MF: Which you take to an extreme in a way, because they are actually having intercourse.

BL: For a long time I didn’t want that in the script, but now I’m glad it’s there. I felt like it was a little too obvious, but the more we worked with the idea of lost innocence and the idea of "playing" adults, it made more sense.

LW: That was a way to numb his pain, through this physical act. It had no emotional attachment to him. The real emotional attachment comes at the end when Candy really connects with Eddie. She notices his pain when he’s zoning out as they have sex, that’s when she realizes for the first time that there’s something wrong with him.

BL: It’s not just fun and games – they're not playing "house."

LW: Yeah, it’s not fun and games. Whereas before she was like, “I don’t want to have anything to do with you, but I’m going to show off and make you come and get me.”

MF: She even flashes him.

LW: That was an accident.

BL: A discovered moment.

LW: She was supposed to be seducing him, of course, but her flashing her panties at him, it just happened. I love happy accidents.

MF: Just before he’s about to talk to another young woman, Christina, a former high school classmate, there’s a shot of the back of his head, which you used as a still for your publicity materials and website. The scene is shot from behind him, and it has the feel as if he’s on a precipice.

BL: And you see a kid running in front of him in slow motion.

LW: That’s a motif we have throughout, the back of his head. And we wanted to give the sense that he’s disoriented from his environment, to show how disconnected he is; things are going in and out of frame.

BL: When you watch it, you feel almost like you’re on a ride or you’re floating.

LW: That’s something I really wanted to explore in the film, the subjective experience. I’m very attracted to films that are completely one character-driven, where we see things only through that character’s eyes and we experience it with them, like in Clean, Shaven, Lodge Kerrigan’s film, which I really admire. And that was what I wanted to show, through the camera, so the back of his head expresses the fact that Eddie is “not really there” – he’s not present.

BL: You don’t see his eyes.

LW: He’s lost. You don’t have access to him, he doesn’t have access to himself. We used that image three times in the film.

MF: Including the opening shot, when he’s in the shower.

BL: After he breaks down at the end with Candy, we don’t see the back of his head anymore.

LW: He’s not playing that role anymore.



MF: The film is a well-paced 13 minutes. What was left on the cutting room floor?

LW: It was a much longer film, at one point it was about 22 minutes. It was a real lesson in editing and what you need and what you don’t need. Because if you have to tell a story in such a short amount of time there’s so much unnecessary fat that you have to take out so the story doesn’t get lost in all these other things. We had some scenes with the parents that didn’t feel right for the short. For the pacing you’re talking about we could only tell one story. And that story was about Eddie and his inability to connect with anyone, so if we showed him connecting with his mom or his dad then it would have less of an impact when you realize how different he is from everybody. We had a scene between him and his mother that had a great little moment between them, but to have him connect with her – Eddie doesn’t really talk much in the film until he explodes – so if we had him talking before that, that moment when he explodes, that monologue, would be less effective.

BL: It would be moot. Any signal that he needs help that is perceivable by anyone other than Candy would work against the whole tenor of the film. The dramatic irony.

LW: No one really understands what he’s going through, except for the audience, through the camera. Like in The Graduate, that’s another example of a very subjective film. The film is beautifully executed because the camera is expressing for the audience the protagonist’s emotional state.

MF: Cigarette Candy has won awards and screened at some very prestigious festivals, including Palm Springs International ShortFest, SXSW, San Sebastian, and Cannes. Any particular reactions from audience members that stand out or were especially gratifying?

LW: At SXSW, there was a kid that came up to me after one of the screenings, he was 17 or 18, and he said, “My father’s being deployed in a month, he’s going to Afghanistan for a tour and I really appreciated seeing your movie.” I told him if he ever needed to talk, he should give me a call. We’re in contact with each other now, and that means a lot to me.

BL: That’s what it’s about, connecting and healing. Using stories to create empathy between human beings where there was once only emptiness and loneliness.

LW: Talking about it.

BL: You have to start there. Our Facebook page is almost surreal. One person wrote that Cigarette Candy haunted her dreams after she saw it screen at the Florida Film Festival.

MF: The film is dedicated to the memory of Lewis Cole and Private First Class George Howell.

LW: Right. It’s dedicated to Lewis because without him, the film would never have been made, and George Howell because he was a friend of the real Eddie Van Buren.

BL: It’s a bizarre story, but when we were casting for the role of Eddie Van Buren, which was a completely fictitious name, I got an e-mail from a soldier stationed in Iraq whose real name was Eddie Van Buren.

LW: He had googled his name to see if he could find articles about when he played sports in college and he came across our casting call.

BL: And he was like, “This is me. Why are you making a film about me?!” And part of Eddie’s monologue came from a story the real Eddie told us.

LW: Eddie wrote us long e-mails, he wanted to connect with us. George Howell was a close friend and fellow solider of Eddie’s who died in Eddie’s arms in Iraq. Eddie told us many heart-wrenching war stories, one of which was about an IED hitting Eddie’s truck, and his second in command came up to Eddie and put a cigarette in his mouth to make sure he was alive. We actually had that already in the screenplay where at the end Candy puts a cigarette in Eddie’s mouth to make sure he is okay.

BL: It was kind of amazing, that we already had that in there.

MF: You now intend to make this as a feature film.

LW: Yes, Jeff Sousa and I wrote a feature-length screenplay. It expands upon that story we set up in the short. It’s about Eddie seeking atonement for paralyzing his sergeant. He seeks forgiveness, but while he tries to find that forgiveness and confess to his sergeant at home, he falls into an affair with the sergeant’s rebellious teenage daughter, Candy.

MF: A soldier who goes through something like that, what do you envision happening to Eddie (in the short)?

LW: I don’t think he can go back (to the Marines). At the end of the film he strips off his uniform; he takes it off and he becomes totally exposed and the crying is like a freeing, it’s a way of cleansing himself. I think once you go through that experience you can’t really go back.

BL: He’s been emotionally wounded.

LW: My Dad works at the VA/DoD Liaison Office at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Washington, DC (http://www.va.gov/) and is also doing work to try and figure out how best to treat our veterans. He is working at helping them with the psychological wounds because there are so many veterans who have problems with psychological repercussions in addition to just the physical, partly due to advances in medical technology; people are able to be kept alive now when in past wars, they would have died. It’s important to me that this film was not intended to show that they’re not heroes, because they are –

BL: Very much so.

LW: We’re just trying to show the reality of the situation.

MF: That’s a beautiful connection between the film and what your father is now doing.

LW: Yes, my father joined the armed services when I was born so this is all I have ever known, and it is a story I felt that I needed to tell. My father’s shown the film to the VA, he wants to promote it within the VA. I was worried that he might have an issue with the film, but he connected to it.

BL: We always had the goal of creating a very respectful piece. To be sensitive. The only thing the film could be said to be judgmental about is war, just war itself.

LW: We always wanted to tell this individual story of this PERSON who is coming back home and how does he re-adjust to what he once knew? His parents don’t know what’s going through his mind. That was something I really wanted to explore by using the camera, to show someone going through an experience in their head and the emotional impact he’s having on others around him. It’s not an objective movie. You really don’t see how his parents see him, you just see how he sees the world. That’s something I really wanted to explore – the audience knows, but his own family doesn’t know.

Cigarette Candy was the Winner of the Short Film Jury Award for Best Narrative Short at the 2010 SXSW Film Festival.

For more information, visit the website: http://www.cigarettecandy.com
and join the Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/CigaretteCandy

Balka - Three Stories

Mike Fishman of Ourspacemovieblog recently sat down with filmmakers/sisters Anya Meksin (M.F.A. Candidate in Film, Columbia University) and Leeza Meksin (a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist) to discuss their short documentary, Balka – Three Stories. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Synopsis: Balka – Three Stories chronicles the lives of women struggling with drug use and HIV in Ukraine. Through the course of the film we meet Zina and Mirina – best friends and active drugs users about to discover their HIV status; Tanya, a mother of two who has transitioned into substitution treatment but whose husband continues to use drugs; and Galya, a former user who now works as a peer-to-peer outreach worker. Balka - Three Stories was made with the support of the Open Society Institute’s International Harm Reduction Development Program and the Institute for International Education’s Fulbright Program.


Mike Fishman for Ourspacemovieblog (MF): Anya, I’m most familiar with your work as a narrative filmmaker. What made you want to make a documentary and where did the idea for Balka - Three Stories come from?

Anya Meksin (AM): Well, Leeza and I had been developing a documentary project exploring our family’s background in the former Soviet Union; in Ukraine, Moscow and Uzbekistan. We’re immigrants to the U.S. and we wanted to make a quirky documentary about our relationship and our family’s background. We were trying to raise money to make that film and go to Eastern Europe, and we couldn’t. But one day I was talking to one of my best friends from college, Sophie Pinkham, and I was telling her how much we really wanted to go to Ukraine; she was in Ukraine on a Fulbright Scholarship at the time researching harm reduction, which is the concept of reducing the risk associated with dangerous behaviors like drug use or sex work. She suggested we come and make a film about what she was doing, working with women drug users and the programs that try to serve them. She also suggested that we apply for funding through the Open Society Institute where she has close connections, so we drafted a proposal based on the expertise that she could bring to the project as a producer and the filmmaking and language skills that we could bring. That became our opportunity to go to Eastern Europe, and from there it transformed into this incredibly meaningful project for us.

MF: You wrote a treatment?

AM: Yes, we outlined that we would do three short segments each on a different woman dealing with different aspects of drug use. We knew that we were going to go to three different cities and we gave ourselves freedom to find those stories. The only subject we knew about for sure was Tanya and her children, as she was someone Sophie already knew. Sophie had traveled extensively to the places we were going to film in and knew the people who ran the programs there, so she had a lot of contacts. Every time we got to a city we were welcomed and taken around. Our work was meeting a lot of people and deciding who the other subjects would be. We spoke to many different people and what we originally pitched didn’t necessarily turn out to be what we found; obviously, with a documentary you often have many unexpected developments.

MF: Structurally, each segment gets more positive; you start with two women (Zina and Marina) who are in different states of denial, then move to Tanya who put her life back together, and finish with Galya, who has not only put her life back together but is actively helping other people.

Leeza Meksin (LM): We started filming in Poltava, which is where Galya is doing all this good work, and as soon as we worked with her we knew she was this light of hope, which is the name of the organization she works for (Light of Hope). She really embodied that positive idea. We knew that she would probably be the most positive of all the people that we would come across, so it was then, at the very beginning of filming, that we started to envision this progression. We wanted to cover all kinds of situations, not just limit it to a sort of “feel good, you can do it” theme, but also people who are really struggling while getting harm reduction services in some way. We really wanted to show a range of situations but it wasn’t until we filmed the first section that we realized it would probably be the last section in the film.

AM: I remember when we filmed the garden scene with Galya and I felt it would be an amazing place to end the film. I remember this moment of following her around the garden and through the foliage and the way the sunlight was. I had an emotional experience following her with the camera, and it felt to me like that should be the emotion we leave the audience with. And it ended up working out that way.

MF: What were your roles vis-à-vis the filmmaking process?

AM: I did the camera and Leeza did the sound.

MF: So it was just you two?

AM: And Sophie, as the producer; she was with us all the time. Basically we did the technical aspects while Sophie took a lead in organizing our shooting schedule and coordinating with people. All three of us can speak Russian, but she knows the most about the topic, so it was essential to have her.

MF: There are quite a few unexpected moments, such as when Tanya is crossing a very shaky bridge or in Gala’s segment where the drug dealer starts yelling at her dog and threatens to beat the dog –

LM: Yes, there were definitely certain things that happened that afterwards we were like, “Did we get that? I hope we got that!” And we made a practice of reviewing the footage every night (Anya used a CANON XH-A1s) so we had a sense each day of what we were getting and what we still needed to get. But we definitely found that in the end, we got the most interesting material just by being in the right place at the right time.

AM: I was used to narrative filmmaking where you’re working on a film set, and you position the camera in exactly the place you need it to be. Here, I was working much more on an emotional level, in response to what was happening, what was unfolding in front of the camera. And the challenge for me was to not let that translate into moving the camera too much, changing the angle, zooming in or out. In those moments when the material was strongest and unexpected, I tried to sort of shut down a little bit as a cinematographer, to just capture what was happening. I was basically just watching what was happening.

LM: Some of those moments became humorous, like when the dog you mentioned started barking and Lena goes nuts yelling obscenities at her dog –

AM: And the camera shakes! I was actually a little scared.

(Both laugh.)

MF: So in those moments, you purposefully refrained from doing anything with the camera other than just continue shooting.

AM: Right, if I felt like if it was obvious something dramatic was happening –

LM: It’s best to keep the camera neutral.

AM: Exactly. And there were times when that was very difficult, to just be neutral, especially in the scene where Zina found out she had HIV. That was an incredibly challenging scene while I was in the (roaming HIV testing) van with her and when we were outside, she was in such dire need of counseling, just reassurance and dialogue. What appears in the film is just a small part of the conversation we all were having.

LM: When we were trying to comfort them.

MF: With the camera on or off?

LM: The camera kept running but when we were editing, it seemed unnatural to include our voices suddenly, and there was a lot of conversation that happened that included us, which kind of highlighted the fact that no counseling really happened from the nurse who tested Zina in the van. It almost felt wrong to be filming -- it was so intimate and personal, so we had to cut out almost all of it and just tie together enough to get across the situation.

MF: Clearly that was a line you had to walk often, how intimate do you get, as the access you were permitted is quite remarkable, such as when Zina injects a needle into her groin. Was that due to Sophie’s connections that you obtained such access?

AM: Sophie didn’t really know the subjects although of course she knew the people who ran the harm reduction organizations. I think it was mostly due to the fact that they were women, we were young women, and we made it a priority to become friends with them and to treat them like collaborators and to let them into the goal of the film.

LM: We spent a lot of time just hanging out with them, not filming, and I think that helped to put them at ease. And so a lot of the best filming would happen the last few days we had with them because by then they could be open with us, they felt like friends and they didn’t feel judged, which was really important. I think they all felt honored to be part of a project on this topic. They realized how important their message may be for other women in their situation, and they wanted to share their stories honestly so maybe it would help others like them.

MF: Do you think the fact that you were sisters made it feel more comfortable or safe for them?

LM: I think so. When we finished filming Zina and Marina’s section, which was the last section we filmed, our father, who was born in Ukraine, came to meet us, and I think the fact that this older man, our father, was warm and open and not judging them either, meant a lot to them.

AM: And the fact that we were Eastern European. It would have been a much more difficult project to film if we were, say, Americans and we came to sort of look down on them. It meant a lot that we were immigrants, that we shared a lot with them, even small things like “That’s the same tea set my aunt had when we were growing up.” There was a feeling of intimacy.

MF: The term Balka, which refers to the wooded area where people go to buy and do drugs –

AM: A Balka is a regional term used to refer to a low lying wooded area outside of town where often a stream or river used to be but that has dried up. During World War II, Jewish people in Ukrainian towns were often rounded up and shot in the balkas, so they are also the sites of mass graves.

MF: Marked or unmarked?

LM: Sometimes they have stones that will say something like “A thousand peaceful civilians were shot here by the Nazis.” But they never make mention of the fact that they were all Jews, and a lot of the sites don’t even have that.

MF: The people who go there to buy and do drugs, even if there is no marker, they’re aware of that history?

AM: Yeah, absolutely.

MF: So, with no connection to its emotional history, a Balka is, for them, a place where it’s safe to buy and do drugs.

AM: Right, it’s this marginal pace on the outskirts of town –

LM: That’s not policed or monitored.

AM: Exactly. It’s like this no man’s land. Of course, we were struck with the allegorical resonance of the setting as a marginal place outside of society, as many of the women we met exist on the margins of their society.

Follow Balka - Three Stories on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/BALKA/338397962554?ref=ts

It’s a Gift: W.C. Fields in the Movies

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Cinema Series It’s a Gift: W.C. Fields in the Movies, taking place every Tuesday through July 6, is revelatory and richly rewarding. Watching Fields is always richly rewarding, just as watching any great physical comic, from classics like Chaplin, Keaton and The Marx Brothers to modern comedians Jim Carrey and Jack Black. But the emphasis on Fields’ early silent work, with occasional live piano accompaniment by Ben Model (www.silentfilmmusic.com) is enlightening for shining a light on Fields’ entrance into film in 1915 at the considerably advanced age of 35, having already made a name for himself as a vaudeville and stage star. The more well-known Fields of later films such as The Dentist (1932), My Little Chickadee (1940) and Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941) was, admittedly, often caustic and not exactly huggable and lovable. But in these early silent films, we see a more tender Fields, the camera’s light freshly hitting the twinkle in his mischievous eye.

There was a nice New York feel to the screening of So’s Your Old Man (1926) on a recent Tuesday, the film having been shot in New York, as many of them were (Queens, Hicksville, Brooklyn) and an audience member sharing that copies of the out-of print book W.C. Fields: A Life on Film written by Fields’ grandson Ronald Fields are available at the Strand. Fields’ granddaughter, Harriet Fields, in attendance to introduce the screening and take questions, was pleased to hear that as she rather shamelessly (and why not?) hawked Fields and the website www.wcfields.com. Of course, she was preaching to the converted , but here’s hoping Fields’ work will find new audiences on DVD. It is somewhat depressing to consider, though, is he too minor to survive? And what about Keaton? Chaplin as icon is assured his prominent place, but what of the Marx Brothers? Will they become like the Ritz Brothers? There is no substitute for seeing a film like So’s Your Old Man (or the week before Sally of the Sawdust starring Carol Dempster, a sweetie whose eyes could break your heart) with a live audience laughing up at the screen, sharing a life-affirming if fleeting bond. One has to wonder if there will exist such an audience fifty years from now, a hundred years from now. Mike Fishman.

www.wcfields.com
www.nypl.org/locations/lpa

The Brooklyn Int'l Film Festival (BiFF) is proud to announce its 13th annual festival, themed STUNT, presented by BUSHMILLS IRISH WHISKEY.

The competitive event will run from June 4-13 at indieScreen, a brand new venue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Brooklyn Heights Cinema. The festival has received over 2,400 films from 92 countries, and will present over 100 film premieres.

For more info, please visit www.brooklynfilmfestival.org.

The Brooklyn International Film Festival announces 6th ANNUAL kidsfilmfest

June 12th and June 13th

The Brooklyn International Film Festival (BiFF) is proud to announce the 6TH annual kidsfilmfest which will be staged at two locations: June 13th at 1pm, at indieScreen, BiFF's brand-new space in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and June 12th throughout the day at the Long Island Children's Museum. Since 2004, kidsfilmfest has followed its mission to promote children’s filmmakers and to educate young movie-goers about the art of film production.

The program will be tailored for children of all ages (films will be rated "G"). It will consist of numerous short animation and narrative films from five countries. Children can get acquainted with the filmmakers while taking part in workshops about the films screened at the festival. Attendees not only watch the films, but will also be able to discuss and explore the background of their production. There will be a Q&A with the directors and actors as well as a director’s interactive workshop following the June 13th screening at indieScreen.

The 13th annual BiFF, themed STUNT, will run from June 4th to June 13th at indieScreen in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and the Brooklyn Heights Cinema.

For full film lineup and general info please visit www.kidsfilmfest.org or contact Lisa King, 646-234-5080 or lisa@kidsfilmfest.org.

Brendan Rose’s 2009 Top 10 Films

Here is the 2009 version of my (slightly pretentious) Top 10 Films list, with apologies to Crazy Heart, The Messenger, and a few others that I have not yet seen.

1) 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis) – A beautifully elegant, melancholy gem of a film. This lean story contains an entire world.
2) The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke) – This arguably didactic film is also defined by formal brilliance and a razor-sharp intelligence in Haneke guiding the ship.
3) Hunger (Steve McQueen) – An uncompromising, unsentimental, brutal film about horrific oppression and a desperate act of protest. The endless dialogue sequence between Sands and the priest is pure genius and anchors the film.
4) 24 City (Jia Zhangke) – Jia’s films possess a completely original cinema grammar. An illuminating and affecting look at China’s rush towards modernity.
5) After Life (Hirokazu Kore-Eda) – Another delicately observed drama from one of world cinema’s best.
6) Headless Woman (Lucretia Martel) – Hypnotic metaphysical drama that touches on class and identity within Argentina in the most subtle of ways.
7) Two Lovers (James Gray) – Gray continues to make rugged outer-borough pictures that defy the gentrifying city’s pop image.
8) Adventureland (Greg Mottola) – A funny, bittersweet coming-of-age tale with brains.
9) Where the Wild Things Are (Spike Jonze) – A children’s chronicle of adventure turned into a gorgeously shot study of the struggle between youthful exuberance and adulthood’s pensive regrets.
10) Me and Orson Welles (Richard Linklater) – Old Broadway, Orson Welles, and pre-war Manhattan all in one. A film brimming with possibility!

Honorable Mention
• The Informant (Steven Soderbergh) – The most hilarious yet dark and depressing film about capitalism ever made. Matt Damon is unstoppable!
• Public Enemies (Michael Mann) – Has a period drama ever felt more “present?”