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Compelling blends of fiction and nonfiction are highlights of the current New Directors/New Films series at Film at Lincoln Center and MOMA, running April 2–13. Croatian director Igor Bezinovic’s “Fiume o Morte!” (April 4–5) is a fresh take on the historical drama, executed with courage, skill, and sardonic wit. After World War I, the Croatian city of Rijeka fell under the control of Italian nationalists led by the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who transformed the city known as Fiume from 1919 to 1921 into a proto-fascist dictatorship that earned the admiration of Benito Mussolini. Bezinovic uses archival footage and photographs to tell the rise and fall of that regime, and, largely through interviews with townspeople, assembles a team of nonprofessionals to recreate the events on the same sites. The film's comical, sarcastic approach, however, emphasizes the grisly details of an adventure that begins with a demagogue's cult of followers and ends with bloody corpses. The film powerfully conveys the oppressive feeling of experiencing history in the present tense.
“Fiume o Morte!” by Croatian director Igor Bezinović. Photo courtesy of Lightdox
A literary detective story filled with the small details of everyday life, Lost Chapters (April 3 and 5) by Venezuelan director Lorena Alvarado stars her real family: her sister, Ena; her father, Ignacio; and her grandmother, Adela Rodríguez. Ena, 25, visits Ignacio, a book collector who specializes in national literature. In one of his volumes, Ena discovers a note about an early twentieth-century Venezuelan writer she has never heard of, and, as she begins her own investigation, begins to doubt his real existence. Meanwhile, Adela, a former poet now showing signs of senile dementia, creates spontaneous poetry full of jarring inconsistencies. Alvarado and José Hostos handled the cinematography, and their keen sense of light, color, and rhythm infuses Adela's tender observations and enigmatic asides with drama and passion.
Documentary filmmaker Courtney Stevens makes her first quasi-fiction , Invention (April 5-6), in collaboration with actress Callie Hernandez, who stars as Carrie, a young woman visiting a small New England town to claim the ashes of her late father, a doctor and spiritual healer whose ambitious plans have gone awry. Here, Carrie inherits the patent for his electromagnetic device and, in an effort to better understand it and him, becomes involved with his associates and becomes embroiled in their conspiracies. The local, face-to-face action is enhanced by clips of her father’s commercials (taken from Hernandez’s own actual footage) and wry metafictional touches. Through striking vistas of untouched nature, Stevens evokes traces of the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau that survive the noise of modern media. — Richard Brody
Sourse: newyorker.com
