The 15th edition of the New York Underground Film Festival opens tonight with a film we’ve covered extensively since its Toronto premiere, Suroosh Alvy and Eddy Moretti’s Heavy Metal in Baghdad. The fest runs through April 8, and when it’s over, it’s over: though co-directors Kevin McGarry and Nellie Killian are said to be working on mounting a new event with a similar spirit, the NYUFF as we know it will cease to exist after this run.

Ed Halter ran the festival for ten years, taking it over for co-founder and future Old School director Todd Phillips (yes, seriously). Halter has an obit of sorts at the Village Voice, in which he makes it clear that NYUFF isn’t ending because it has to financially. “It’s a conscious decision: There’s no rent hike to point to, no defunding agency to blame…True to its indie-rock genealogy, the NYUFF has always functioned more like a band than a traditional arts organization…Sometimes, a band just decides to call it quits—and hopes to go out in style, while it’s still got the knack.”

That said, NYUFF may not have worn out its welcome, but––to extend the indie-rock metaphor––this fest ending in 2008 is sort of like Pavement shutting down after Terror Twilight: things haven’t become embarrassing yet, but the enterprise has started to drift somewhat from what its core audience fell in love with. The way Halter describes NYUFF’s glory days, it’s apparent that it’s an event that was pegged to (and helped disseminate) a zeitgeist that may no longer really exist:

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• Jurgen Fauth has nothing but praise for Heavy Metal in Baghdad (we felt pretty much the same when we saw it in Toronto), the screening of which, Jurgen says, “was so oversold that I ended up in the front row, effectively watching a distorted fun house mirror version of Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti’s documentary.”
• “Most of the European critics came down pretty hard on Petri Kotwica’s Black Ice, a film in competition from Finland,” notes Filmbrain, “But I found this deliciously dark drama about dangerous deceptions to be a good bit of trashy fun.” Mr. Grant is far less enthusiastic about In Love We Trust and Just Anybody.
• Daniel Kasman is not entirely sold on Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, but he concedes “Maddin’s humor comes through perhaps stronger in this film than any other (he narrates himself, with dialog by regular collaborator George Toles), pushing an obsessive, if not repetitive, theme of the life of a city and the life of a boy being an inescapable series of traumatic, almost unreal conflicts and co-minglings of unreturnable pasts and their dream-like traces in the present.” Also at The Auteurs Notebook: an extremely memorable one-liner from Klaus Kinski’s “notorious one man show,” Jesus Christ Saviour.
• 3..2…1…and the Filth and Wisdom backlash has arrived.

I did not expect to wake up this morning to a feed reader and email inbox full of stories about the full lineup for the 2008 SXSW Film Festival––the press release was not supposed to arrive until sometime this afternoon. But The Hollywood Reporter apparently broke the embargo on the information yesterday evening, so now it’s here. And it’s a LOT to process before coffee.

In a nutshell: we’re looking at new films from Michael Almereyda, Ashley Sabin and David Redmon, Joe Swanberg, Mary Bronstein, Lynn Shelton, and Frank V. Ross; Sundance hits American Teen, Gonzo, The Order of Myths, Baghead, and Goliath; and a number of buzzy films culled from recent international fests, including Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Stones doc Shine a Light, Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely, Christophe Honore’s Love Songs, and Heavy Metal in Baghdad. All of that should be enough to make anyone happy, but of course, there’s also much, much more.

The full lineup is after the jump. We’ll have sickeningly exhaustive coverage of SXSW starting soon. The Festival itself begins March 7.

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Movies are a great way to explore the risk we never took. INTO THE WILD opens tonight, Sean Penn shares the story of first reading the book from an interview in Telluride. We also look at THE MOSQUITO COAST (1986, Peter Weir), starring Harrison Ford, and what these films tell us about breaking from civilization and doing the unthinkable. Karina interviews the makers of HEAVY METAL IN BAGHDAD and it becomes clear why she wrote “I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad.”

FilmCouch #38

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Into the Wild, The Mosquito Coast, Heavy Metal in Baghdad

Do edgy American filmmakers of yesteryear go soft after living in Hollywood for a few decades? We look at Neil Jordan’s new film The Brave One, starring Jodie Foster, and ask how it measures up to her grittier predecessor, Taxi Driver. Also, Karina shares her picks from the Toronto Film Festival, including the much-buzzed western, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Anton Corbijn’s Joy Division biopic Control, and two fresh Iraq-umentaries, Heavy Metal in Baghdad and Operation Filmmaker.

 

 FilmCouch #37 [23:36m]: Play Now | Download

FilmCouch #37

The Brave One, Heavy Metal in Baghdad, Operation Filmmaker

Last weekend at the Toronto Film Festival, I sat down for a longish interview with Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti, directors of the excellent documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad. We’ll have a lot more from that interview in an upcoming installment of FilmCouch, but below you’ll find a preview. Acrassicauda, the band depicted in the film, are currently living in exile (and in extreme poverty) in Syria, and are in danger of being deported back to Iraq. In this clip, Alvi and Moretti explain what the filmmakers are doing to help Acrassicauda escape their current situation and live out their heavy metal dreams.

The second episode of ReelerTV from Toronto is all about music. Stu talks to Scott Hicks about his polar-opposite follow-up to No Reservations, Glass: A Portrait in 12 Parts. Karina offers micro-reviews of the French musical Love Songs, and the amazing documentary Heavy Metal in Baghdad.

I don’t care how tired of Iraq documentaries you think you are–you need to see Heavy Metal in Baghdad. Executive produced by Spike Jonze in conjunction with VBS.tv (the online video venture of VICE Magazine, of which Jonze is creative director), the film tells the story of four years in the life of Acrassicauda, allegedly the first (and probably the only) Iraqi heavy metal band. It’s the first piece of media I’ve seen that potentially has the power to break through “Iraq fatigue” and actually get American kids to care about the decimation of Iraq and the ensuing refugee crisis.

Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti (co-founder of VICE Magazine and head of VICE Films, respectively) had been following the Acrassicauda saga for three years before ever meeting the band members. MTV’s Gideon Yago wrote a story on the band for VICE in 2003, and two years later, the magazine sponsored an Acrassicauda show in war-torn Baghdad. At that point, the situation in Iraq was already so epically bad that between death threats, blackouts and US military red tape, the show almost didn’t happen, and when it did, Alvi and Moretti found themselves locked out in Lebanon. A year later, fully aware that the violence in Baghdad was escalating on a daily basis, the filmmakers embarked on a trip to Iraq, “to see if [the band members] were still alive.” The week they departed, a TIME Magazine cover story on the war ran with the headline, “Life in Hell.”

Before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the boys of Acrassicauda were reasonably fun-loving, apolitical kids (in an early scene, the drummer says he changes the channel every time something about the war comes on TV), who were more or less able to eat their metal hearts out–as long as they respected Saddam and steered clear of head-banging, which can be mistaken in the Muslim world for Jewish prayer. But as the war drags on, their real-life circumstances begin to imitate heavy metal mythology: separated from one another by streets full of fire, corpses and (maybe most dangerously) justified paranoia, in five years the band is only able to play six shows. By late 2006, these educated, middle-class twentysomethings are “rock n’ roll refugees,” struggling to hang on to a less-than-zero existence in Syria after literally running for their lives from Baghdad.

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