“I am a man of struggle and my cinema is the cinema of the liberation struggle of my people.” -Yilmaz Güney

Critics are fond of separating a filmmaker’s “life” from his “work,” as if the two were related but autonomous spheres. In the case of Yilmaz Güney, the hollow-cheeked, mustachioed action movie star and director whose name has become legend in Turkey, it is clear to everyone that the two are inseparable. A communist Kurd, Güney was looked upon with an unfriendly eye by three successive military regimes in Turkey and spent twelve of his 26 years as a filmmaker behind bars.

READ MORE

Even considering the long history of alternative Indian cinemas that have emerged under the shadow of Bollywood—the insistent auteurism of Guru Dutt, the humanist realism of Satyajit Ray, the Marxist interventions of Mrinal Sen—the subcontinent has produced nothing else like Kamal Swaroop’s utterly sui generis feature debut, Om Dar Ba Dar.

Upon its completion in 1988, Swaroop’s periphrastic coming-of-age tale baffled national film censors, who damned it to obscurity with an “adults only” rating. Nevertheless, it garnered critical acclaim and almost mythic notoriety through decades of festival screenings, eventually achieving an unparalleled cult status among Indian cinephiles, largely on the basis of murky file-shared video dubs. Now newly-restored, it was released to theaters in India for the first time only this year.

Swaroop’s film begins in a fictional village in Rajasthan, where Om, the son of an eccentric astrologer, grows from boyhood to adolescence alongside his sister Gayatri, a small-town feminist who insists on sitting in the men’s section at the local movie house. The fever dream plot that spins around these two characters defies easy recounting: a mysterious woman arrives as if from the pages of a pulp Hindi novel; festive Diwali firecrackers transform into actual bombs; frogs steal a black-market stash of diamonds; a local businessman attempts to avert the next World War; Om discovers how to breathe underwater and becomes a tourist attraction. Unlike the often strident rejections of popular film form espoused by parallel cinema, Om Dar Ba Dar embraces the Bollywood conventions of romance and musical numbers, but delivers these pleasures through dialog peppered with arch non-sequiturs, sly references to mythology and politics, psychedelic sequences that may be fantasies or dreams, and off-kilter filmi songs larded with weird synths and vocoder. As one New Delhi-based critic put it: “Welcome to the trippiest film made in Indian cinema.”

READ MORE

The story of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and Janis Joplin and how their message for their generation made them targets of a US government plot.

Directed by schlock cinema auteur Larry Buchanan (Zontar the Thing from Venus, Mars Needs Women, The Trial of Lee Harvey Oswald) seven years before Oliver Stone’s The Doors, Buchanan’s film mixes generational war and conspiracy theory in a dead-end mise en scene in which political and pop history compete for attention in anonymous hotel rooms linked by TV sets nobody is watching.

Buchanan, an Austin, Texas-based no-budget filmmaker, could not afford the rights to any Hendrix, Joplin, or The Doors hits, so instead commissioned unconvincing sound-alike songs for his cast of local actors to perform. Beyond the Doors/Down on US, which never played in any theater outside of Austin, presents a posthumous history of classic rock from before the point it was fully commodified, when it was still open to peculiar interpretation and awkward deification.

READ MORE

This is the 2nd show of the Northside Film Festival at Union Docs: WHEN I WALK with POV (PBS) Aubrey Gallegos with feat filmmaker Jason DaSilva + EP Yael Melamede. Reception following!

Q&A with director Jason DaSilva & executive producer Yael Melamede, moderated by Aubrey Gallegos (POV). Reception in honor of the new season of POV will follow the screening.

Jason DaSilva was 25 years old and a rising independent filmmaker when a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis changed everything — and inspired him to make another film. When I Walk is candid and brave chronicle of one young man’s struggle to adapt to the harsh realities of M.S. while holding onto his personal and creative life. With his body growing weaker, DaSilva’s spirits, and his film, get a boost from his mother’s tough love and the support of Alice Cook, who becomes his wife and filmmaking partner. The result is a life-affirming documentary filled with unexpected moments of joy and humor.

READ MORE