Film Movement DVD Collection Review – Beyond Borders: Stories of Interfaith Friendship (Arranged; A Bottle in the Gaza Sea; Foreign Letters)

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Beyond Borders
Faces of Israel

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Released alongside Film Movement's Faces of Israel four-disc film collection of works which offer viewers a snapshot of the complexity and diversity of life in contemporary Israel, the companion box set Beyond Borders celebrates the differences that unite and divide us in a humanistic trio of titles set in the United States as well as the topical region.

But rather than take you through them alphabetically or chronologically, I'm taking a cue from the films included in Borders to go beyond the expected – serving up a review of the titles in the order I'd recommend watching them for the greatest cinematic impact.

 

Foreign Letters (2012)
Directed by Ela Thier

Although it’s included alongside A Bottle in the Gaza Sea, Ela Thier’s largely autobiographical effort Foreign Letters makes a first-rate companion film to the thematically similar, likewise female (co)directed tale Arranged which seems to continue on with the thesis of intercultural female friendship established in Letters.

Easily the best starting place in the Beyond Borders box set celebrating interfaith friendships from the Film Movement catalog, the work chronicles Thier’s own adolescent struggles to navigate life in a new nation where she could barely speak the language.

As the sweet, succinct, 1982-set story begins, the twelve-year-old Ellie (Noa Rotstein) writes what the audience quickly gathers is just the latest in an ongoing series of letters from America to her “best friend times infinity” back in her former Israeli home.

Charting the timeless struggle of not fitting in to not knowing where to sit at lunch, Thier takes a cue from the Peanuts specials of yesteryear by translating the English language instructions of Ellie’s everyday teacher (outside the ESL classroom) into veritable gibberish in her feature-length adaptation of her acclaimed short A Summer Rain (which is also included on the DVD).

Thier’s subtle portrait of coming-of-age in a brand new country slowly but steadily picks up momentum as Ellie finds a friend in a fellow outsider via the Vietnamese refugee Thuy (Dalena Le).

Shy and studious as well as just as self-conscious as Ellie, the two girls begin testing the waters of a fledgling friendship that was initially forged out of loneliness and necessity before they soon discover that their differences are nowhere near as important as their similarities.

Educating themselves about life in their new surroundings, the girls balance one another out while also giving each other the vital self-confidence they need to stop hiding in the shadows of a school that isn’t nearly as ready to accept them as they are ready to accept both each other as well as everyone else.

While it’s a bit structurally underwhelming as we get the feeling that Thier wasn’t entirely sure what to do with the production’s full ninety-nine minute running time (versus the original seventeen minute short which also utilized the same talented young leads), Letters nonetheless manages to overcome the bumps in the road to leave a lasting impression.

Furthermore, the film’s sheer authenticity elevates Thier's work as a timeless portrait of female adolescent existential angst that resonates as strongly today as we imagine it would've if released in its original 1982 time period.

Thus in spite of a floundering middle act that gets bogged down with somewhat episodic plotting, we're more than willing to take a cue from Ellie and give it some time to find its way.

A moving and sensitive salute to the importance of human connection as well as a completely preach-free reminder that we’re all humans with the same wants, needs, fears, laughter, and tears regardless of our language or homeland, Thier’s autobiographical cinematic journey results in one of the best family friendly offerings in the entire Film Movement catalog.

Reminding viewers of the rewards that await us when we dare to look past the popular lunch table of cliquish Twilight style commercial friendly studio fare, Foreign Letters serves as an excellent “starter” picture to introduce middle school students to the world of international filmmaking by way of characters they can relate to that likewise have something of quality to say.

 

A Bottle in the Gaza Sea (2011)
Directed by Thierry Binisti

Adapting a work from the “tell me” medium of literature to the “show me” medium of film is difficult enough as it is without even considering the fact that for the title in question, the story unfolds largely through the written word as the most pivotal sequences revolve around the sending and receipt of e-mail messages.

Of course, considering that the characters at the heart of A Bottle in the Gaza Sea are a French born seventeen-year-old Israeli girl (Agathe Bonitzer) and a twenty-year-old Palestinian boy (Mahmoud Shalabi) who found her cyber address included in the titular bottle, it’s safe to say that Gaza isn’t your typical pen pal saga.

Wanting to make sense of all of the suicide bombings that occur on her side of the water, the beautiful idealist Tal sends her query out to the unknown via her older brother who’s able to hurl the bottle into the Gaza Sea while carrying out his required military service.

What begins as a heated, blame-filled exchange of sarcasm and oft-heard clichéd generalizations gradually blossoms into something much more substantive as the two share their thoughts, typed snapshots of daily life, and later actual photographs that make them realize that if they’d met anywhere else under ordinary circumstances there’s a pretty strong likelihood that they would’ve become friends.

Part of the three disc Beyond Borders collection crafted to explore interfaith relationships, while Bottle might hold up well on its own, unfortunately when viewed alongside the other two vastly superior titles included in the set, it’s the weakest entry in an otherwise staggeringly impressive triple feature.

While the thematically similar Foreign Letters is much more natural in its approach, the admirable effort put forth by filmmaker Thierry Binisti to capture both points-of-view and likewise evoke empathy for each character (while simultaneously pulling you in two totally different directions) makes the film seem much better than it actually is in the end.

An unapologetically hopeful work that’s bogged down by awkward performances and emotionless English language line-reads by its young actors (which should've been subtitled along with its foreign dialogue), Bottle is an otherwise well-intentioned attempt to translate Valerie Zenatti’s award-winning novel to the screen.

Though you wish the final result would've been far more compelling, Bottle stays afloat – getting better as it continues – which results in a surprisingly moving final sequence that’s guaranteed to stay with you.

Largely wordless and therefore much more effective at conveying the real unspoken bond between the characters as two kids who connected (versus the filmic opportunities to take advantage of politically correct speechmaking), the gorgeous depiction of idealism and acceptance butting heads with bureaucracy conveys everything the filmmaker was trying to say in its memorable conclusion.

As it stands, it’s a lovely throwback to the same spirit of youthful rebellion tempered by the futility of circumstance found in the final frames of ‘50s and ‘60s French New Wave cinema (followed by the British and American pictures it influenced for a majority of the late '60s and '70s).

Moreover it’s further proof of not only Binisti’s artistry but another reminder to those adapting novels in the future that there is indeed a better way to tell the story than through too many voice-overs and shots of inboxes on computer screens.
   

 

Arranged (2007)
Directed by Diane Crespo and Stefan Schaefer

Review: (Originally Published 5/1/08)

"Someone should be shooting a commercial for world peace," fourth grade teacher Nasira Khaldi (Francis Benhamou) jokes to her coworker turned friend Rochel Meshenberg (Zoe Lister-Jones) when the two women bump into one another in a New York park and encourage their younger relatives to play together.

It’s a recurring joke throughout the inviting, original and warmhearted American independent film Arranged that focuses on two young women in their early twenties who, despite their religious differences as a Muslim (Nasira) and an Orthodox Jew (Rochel), are both dealing with similar issues of parental pressure and familial obligation in the quest to marry the two teachers off.

In Rochel's case, this tradition calls for utilizing the talents of a matchmaker who pitches men to her client as if she’s selling automobiles by evaluating their job performance, sustainability and prominence. However for Nasira, it’s a bit more laid back as their father invites over a much older family friend in the hopes that his young daughter will find love with an uncouth gentleman prone to chatting animatedly with food in his mouth.

Meanwhile Rochel contends with a series of disastrous matchups including a painfully awkward first encounter with a man who acts as though he’d rather voluntarily show up for a root canal than a date, along with one man who lets himself into the place and proceeds to snoop through everything while running at the mouth his own sales pitch covering his accomplishments.

Both targets from their female principal who, in trying to compliment their beauty patronizes their beliefs by offering them money to go out and buy designer clothes and have a drink to start taking advantage of the women’s movement, the two modestly dressed new teachers sit singularly at tables away from the more daring and cliquish women their age at the school.

However, the film's leads really hit it off when children question whether or not they hate one another because of what they’ve heard on the news.

In offering the students a unity circle exercise, Rochel and Nasira conduct their own diversity celebration that seems to be far more accessible than the perfunctory district mandated training shown at the start of the film. Sure enough as the women begin spending more time together away from work, they realize they have far more in common than they first assumed.

Touchingly authentic and believably executed, directors Diane Crespo and Stefan Schaefer’s appealing film was a hit in the film festival circuit.

An official selection at the South by Southwest Film Festival and the Miami Jewish Film Festival, Arranged earned the audience award at Berkshire International Film Festival as well as the Grand Chameleon Award for Best Narrative Feature at the 2007 Brooklyn International Film Festival before making its way to DVD from our friends at Film Movement.

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Movie Review: Underwater Dreams (2014)

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In his book On Directing Film, David Mamet sings the virtues of the Kiss method, which he explains stands for “keep it simple, stupid.”

Stressing that the most natural and straightforward approach you can use to convey whatever it is you’re trying to say trumps overcomplicating matters every time, Mamet takes Kiss to heart as one of the most important rules he follows whether he’s crafting a script on the page or bringing it to life on the screen.

And even though he was referring to film, Mamet’s philosophy can extend to any number of fields. How many times have we struggled to do things the hard way only to realize that instead of taxing our brain, the best and most practical solution was the simplest one all along?

In a way, it’s similar to any number of adages that we’ve heard (regardless of culture or background), including that old test-taking theory to always trust your gut rather than second guess yourself into an error.

And in documentary filmmaker Mary Mazzio’s uplifting underwater underdog story Underwater Dreams, she chronicles the role that real world problem solving can play in making people without the access to “out of the box” supplies use “inside of the box” tools in completely unexpected ways.

Recounting the stunning victory of students at Arizona’s Carl Hayden Community High School who beat out the legendarily complicated thinkers at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities via Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in a 2004 underwater robotics competition sponsored by NASA and the Office of Naval Research, Mazzio celebrates the differences that translated to strengths which set them apart.

In a series of highly entertaining interviews, we discover that it’s this elegantly simple thought process – the result of necessity regarding their limited resources and the strength of their background as students that have to think on their feet multiple times a day to make lightning fast yet effective decisions – that helped give the underdog team the edge of unparalleled success.

Using PVC pipe in primary colors purchased on a budget at Home Depot and a whole lot of pungent pipe glue that – when mixed with the Phoenix sunshine and a small enclosed space – inspired the four boys on the team to call their robot that could “Stinky,” the group managed to do the unthinkable.

A school where 92% of students live below the poverty line and most have memories of crossing the border with parents in search of a better life and a brighter future, the students who joined the (then) fledgling robotics club were cheered on the whole way by two dedicated teachers.

In doing so, they managed to achieve dreams most in the area (including some parents with mere grade school educations) never thought possible. And this is doubly impressive when you consider that in addition to not having access to a body of water in their desert location, they built Stinky on an estimated $800 budget vs. the Exxon and big name sponsored state-of-the-art vehicle produced by MIT.

Recounting the incredible journey from the inception of the club all the way up through present day to follow the path taken by the students who won the competition that their ambitious teacher advisers entered simply on a whim for the experience, Mazzio has created a passionate, gripping and at times heartbreaking tale of highs and lows.

Intriguingly contrasting the path taken by the talented students at MIT in her chatty interview-heavy feature, Mazzio’s real thesis is soon revealed in the final act while the socioeconomic differences and the opportunities for the bright Carl Hayden students are cut short after a proposition passed in Arizona to cut off funding to illegal immigrants seeking higher education.

Impressively keeping her focus even when Underwater veers away from the narrative of the competition to channel the difference a decade can make, Mazzio works in humanistic advocacy while always steering it back to the students of the school as opposed to taking the film in an overly political direction.

With the burgeoning marine biology department and underwater robotics team now flourishing with a new generation of gifted thinkers who dream of futures in a wide variety of scientific fields, we’re also shown the flipside to that reality thanks to an increasingly hostile and reactionary political climate that’s incongruous to the academic growth and goals of Carl Hayden’s best and brightest.

A timely documentary, while Mazzio’s movie is especially topical in my adopted state of Arizona, it’s likewise important throughout the country given the rare access viewers have to these socioeconomic, sociopolitical narratives that might encourage advocacy, involvement, more teachers, and social change in other regions.

While Dreams begins with a simple hook to reel us in, it definitely stimulates thought on a deeper level by the end.

A great companion to other similarly themed next-generation competition and education-centric documentaries including Mad Hot Ballroom and Spellbound, Underwater is a cautiously optimistic portrait sure to inspire and influence as well as grow into a greater word-of-mouth hit as more people track it down.

A moving work with so much to say in its succinct running time and one where the film’s memorable voices (including the words spoken by its narrator Michael Pena) will linger long after it’s over, Dreams is an example of Mamet’s Kiss done right.

What it lacks in flashy edits and big budget production specs, it more than makes up for in its celebratory chronicle of an underdog team who dared to dream and had the courage not to let anyone or anything stand in their way of their right to try and make it come true from students to MIT to an unorthodox use of tampons that might have saved the day.

 

Text ©2014, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Sangre de Mi Sangre (2007)

Arriving on DVD on 12/2/08

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Alternate Titles:
Padre Nuestro; Blood of My Blood

Whether it's journeying to a new land or returning from battle-- ultimately, you are who you say you are. Although it's a frequent topic on the evening news-- the term "identity theft," is fairly new and seems to call up images of online tricksters, mailbox raiders, and those seeking to impersonate you to score loots of prized booty like evil, amoral, technological pirates. Yet stemming back to books like The Count of Monte Cristo, to films like Sommersby and even modern day television series like Mad Men which are both set in the past, the irresistible idea that one can-- like hitting reset on a video game-- start over and become someone new has always existed.

Of course, it's much better in fiction and when one nobody is hurt in the process but in the case of writer/director Christopher Zalla's directorial debut Sangre de Mi Sangre, he raises the stakes doubly when the fake and real characters confront each other and also when he blends identity theft with the hot-button issue of illegal immigration. Obviously, on the surface, the two seem to be strange bedfellows but Zalla's plot set-up is ingenious and heartrendingly dramatic. It gives off a literary vibe by taking a rudimentary and gritty approach to the blending of the two instead of relying on cyber crime and a band of thieves with master's degrees in Internet Technology and Computer Information Systems who are unable to find work in this economy (hmm... perhaps that will be his follow up project).

Despite an overly clunky screenplay that often requires so much suspension of disbelief that we're forced to check any sense of logic at the door right from the opening few minutes, the film-- which earned the top Grand Jury Prize at Robert Redford's 2007 Sundance Film Festival-- works well at an essentially human level.

Centering on two young men who meet when both make the more than 2,000 mile journey from Mexico to New York City with the aid of a crooked border patrol employee and trucker, we're quickly introduced to Pedro (Jorge Adrian Espinodola) and Juan (Armando Hernandez) as instantly recognizable cinematic types.

The poor penniless, illiterate peasant Pedro, who recently buried his mother is traveling with the improbable yet optimistically grandiose hope of meeting the man who fathered him, who-- incidentally-- is unaware of his existence. Bearing only a letter of introduction written by his mother before her death, which he's obediently kept sealed and is unwilling or able to read, he bonds with the scheming Juan, whom we first see fleeing an angry group (of possibly those he's wronged) in his homeland before he hitches a ride on the Border Patrol Express.

While we're forced to overlook a few inconsistencies right off the bat involving the truck's proximity to the border, the decision to accept riders who don't have the correct fee, etcetera-- mainly Zalla pushes us past the more cerebral level of thinking by taking us straight into John Steinbeck meets Woody Guthrie territory. Instead of riding the rails, these young men are riding the truck into a country where they stay in the shadows, alluding authorities, and scrape to get by any way they can from sewing pieces of fabric together to make cloth flowers, to working in a kitchen, or trying to hustle on the streets.

Shortly after the two share their story-- or more precisely, the lonely and trusting Pedro hopes for a friend he'll know in New York-- we cut to a brutal reality as Pedro wakes up and is forced out of the truck, briefly beaten by the driver when he initially refuses to leave as he discovers that not only have all the other riders vanished including Juan but his letter has as well.

It seems that the ruthless and cunning, street-smart Juan has decided to look up Pedro's father, Deigo (Jesus Ochoa) himself, managing to locate him with very little trouble due to an address on the letter which-- just to sell the story and gain the confidence of the father as a budding "con" man-- he's read cover to cover.

Although the gruff restaurant kitchen worker Diego is extremely hesitant and unwilling to accept Juan (a.k.a. the "fake Pedro") at first, soon he takes the boy in as Juan does his damndest to scour the man's apartment looking for a rumored hidden stash of money that he's allegedly hording.

Meanwhile, Pedro doesn't fare nearly as well-- with no English, without his backpack, and with pockets full of lint instead of change-- the only thing he has of value is a gold locket bearing family photos which he's promptly swindled out of by a street smart, drug addicted, hooker named Magda (Paola Mendoza).

In a series of increasingly hard to believe scenarios, soon Magda joins the guileless Pedro on his impossible Don Quixote like quest to find his father whom he believes to be wealthy and prominent. Of course, on one level, you realize that Magda is simply-- much like Juan-- in it for the possible money, but the sudden change from Oliver Twist to Nancy Drew to the cliched "Hooker with a Heart of Gold" is much less fascinating than the dynamic between Juan and Diego.

While of course, you can't have the identity theft story without showing both sides of the crime-- namely, both the thief and the victim-- in Sangre, while our hearts are with Pedro throughout, his plot-line seems far less compelling or truthful and there are a few instances involving the prostitution angle (including a rape) that simply feel as though they were worked in to shock us into accepting their dynamic.

Yet, intriguingly-- although it isn't revealed until a bravura confrontation between Juan and Diego near the end of the film as the contents of the letter and circumstances of Pedro's past life in Mexico are finally revealed-- that the Magda and Pedro line finally makes sense. Of course, then again, Diego's comment early on in disgust to his "fake" son that when he'd first come to America, he'd had nothing mirrors Pedro's situation completely.

Thus in Sangre, the back and forth shots between both storylines endlessly remind us of the film's title in translation "Blood of My Blood," but I wonder if it would've been a bit more effective structurally if more of the familial history was hinted at earlier. And likewise, while I'm sure it plays infinitely better on a second viewing (which I'd recommend), to the typical filmgoer, two screenings shouldn't be required for a movie that doesn't fall into the "whodunnit" genre or M. Night Shyamalan territory.

And while the Greek tragedy elements exist as soon as Ochoa (most recently cast in Bond's Quantum of Solace) is first seen onscreen, they aren't fully served up until its riveting third act. In the end, it's the characterizations that draw us in-- despite a far too brief, rushed, and unsatisfactory confrontation and conclusion. For eventually this time in the end, it's the audience-- instead of simply Pedro-- who feels like we've been victimized not just by the scheming Juan but also by a slightly manipulative script from Zalla.

Despite this, otherwise Sangre is a riveting and affecting work that takes a decidedly different look at illegal immigration through the initial and disturbingly problematic thesis of-- in a new land and without documentation-- you are who you say you are whether it's Don Draper, Jack Somersby, The Count of Monte Cristo or a boy named Pedro.

English as a Second Language

Alternate Title: ESL
Director: Youssef Delara

In all this talk about illegal immigrants coming across the border into the United States, sometimes we have a tendency to speak abstractly, to use our sociological background to place large quantities of individuals into a group, and to not only forget that every person is a human being but also to consider what life in America is like for those who crossed legally and who may be growing up as second generation immigrants.

In Youssef Delara’s daring feature English as a Second Language, we meet two very different immigrants in the form of Bolivar De La Cruz (Kuno Becker), an illegal immigrant who crosses in to earn much needed income to support his pregnant wife and Lola Sara (Danielle Camastra), a talented student who spends her nights escaping into nightclubs and one-night stands, struggling to find a balance between her own needs and goals as a second generation immigrant with those of her parents. Maria Conchita Alonso turns in one of the film’s finest performances as Lola’s domineering “old-world” mother who, still bitter at all she’d sacrificed to raise her daughter, finds herself resenting Lola’s independence and free-spirit and wants her daughter to meet the expectations she has in putting family first by becoming prominent, successful and wealthy.

After Lola and Bolivar literally crash into one another in an auto accident and Lola must complete community service to make amends for driving while intoxicated, they reunite in a classroom setting with Lola assistant teaching English as a Second Language in East Los Angeles to a roomful of students (including Bolivar) who realize that in order to secure any kind of employment or get ahead, they must learn the language of their adopted homeland. The film takes an even darker turn as the handsome Bolivar catches the eye of a manipulative actor and nightclub owner Norman Benjamin (John Michael Higgins) who recruits the young man to be a strip dancer for his amoral, greedy clientele. While everything begins to coincide in a rather melodramatic middle section that results in a slightly predictable conclusion, overall, ESL is compelling stuff and earned the film as well as director Delara countless accolades from festivals across America including honors at Newport Beach Film Festival for Outstanding Achievement in Filmmaking among others. While it’s Lola who is arguably set up to be the most relatable character for American audiences as she’s the one who was raised on our soil, the film’s heart belongs to Bolivar and Kuno Becker’s mesmerizing portrayal is sure to impress those who get a chance to track the film down, now that it’s been made available by Slamdance on DVD.