The press release came in Friday afternoon, but I had already abandoned the computer for Tribeca screenings, so I’m just looking at it in depth now: BAMcinematek has announced the lineup for BAMcinemaFEST, the summer event that replaces what was formerly known as Sundance and BAM –– and, it would seem, builds on it substantially. A sampling of the program’s highlights:
- The New York premieres of some of the most interesting American indie festival films of the year, including Beeswax, Brock Enright: Good Times Will Never Be the Same, Children of Invention, Humpday, Sorry, Thanks and You Won’t Miss Me.
- On July 1, “An Evening with Arnaud Desplechin,” in which the director of A Christmas Tale “presents two personal favorites: Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) followed by a conversation with film critic Kent Jones; and then Desplechin will introduce the next screening, François Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid.” I had planned to be out of the country that night, but this sounds almost good enough to change my plans.
- A screening of Metropolis with “live performance of original score by Irish ambient rock collective 3epkano.”
- A retrospective sidebar featuring films by Visconti, Jarmusch and a special 20th anniversary screening of Do the Right Thing.
- Parties! Including the after party for opening night film Don’t Let me Drown, and an all-night movie marathon.
The festival runs from June 17 to July 2.
When Philippe Garrel’s most recent film premiered in competition at Cannes last year, it carried the French title La Frontière de l’aube; that was translated in English in the Cannes guide as Frontier of Dawn, but the subtitle at the beginning of the film read, The Dawn of the Shore. None of these titles give any indication of what this film is: a story of amour gone so fou that the natural world becomes subject to the supernatural. Hands down the most accessible Garrel film I’ve seen, it’s still a strange, swoony, genre-bending challenge. I named it as the best undistributed film of 2008; now, IFC is screening it theatrically in series at BAM in Brooklyn (starting tonight) and at Cinefamily in Los Angeles (Saturday, March 14), before it premieres on VOD.
…Read more
