SILENT LIGHT is a beautifully haunting meditation on the impermanence of existence and love. This visually stunning Cannes Jury Prize winner from Reygadas (JAPON, BATTLE IN HEAVEN) tells a story of adultery and spiritual crisis in an isolated, modern-day German-Mennonite community in Northern Mexico. Husband and father Johan, against the law of God and man, falls in love with another woman. As the devout head of a large family he confronts a difficult question—is his passion the work of the devil, or is he responding to his spiritual soul mate? Infused with an ethereal peace and devastating emotional force, SILENT LIGHT takes us into a family, and a sensual spiritual world, that is both rarely seen and evocatively unpredictable. Mexico’s 2008 submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and one of the audience favorites from PIFF 31.

One of the world’s premiere showcases for animation, the entertaining “Best of Ottawa” program presents festival award winners, audience favorites, and other outstanding and innovative entries in a wide variety of genres and forms. The program includes:

IT’S ALWAYS THE SAME STORY, by Joris Clerté and Anne Morin, France. At the age of 16, Jean-Luc went to the cinema and saw a movie that would forever change how he looked at his father. (5 mins.)

CATTLE CALL, by Mike Maryniuk and Matt Ranki, Canada. Auctioneering and animation meet in a wonderfully boisterous pixillated report from the Winnipeg stockyards. (3 mins.)

I SLEPT WITH COOKIE MONSTER, by Kara Nasdor-Jones, US. An account of a woman’s struggle with, and triumph over, domestic violence. (3 mins.)

THE COMIC THAT FRENCHES YOUR MIND, by Bruce Bickford, US. A drug-muddled mind tries to think back to its origins in this brain-melting exercise in pencil-on-paper animation. (5 mins.)

A LETTER TO COLLEEN, by Andy and Carolyn London, US. Haunted for years by the events of his 18th birthday, Andy London writes a letter to Colleen in an effort to put his demons to rest. (9 mins.)

THE MIXY TAPES, by David Seitz and Mike Wray, Canada. Musician MIXYLODIAN (Wray) and filmmaker Seitz team up in multiple animated ways to tell the story of their increasingly problematic effort to collaborate on a film. (6 mins.)

ÚLTIMO: “SPONG ICE,” by Bolos Quentes Design, Portugal. Made from ink on 16mm film, this music video for Portugal’s Último mixes live action, animation, music, and movement into a richly textured whole. (3 mins.)

THE CONTROL MASTER, by Run Wrake, Great Britain. In peaceful Halftone City, a mysterious heroine and a brave ally face the ultimate threat. (7 mins.)

CHAINSAW, by Dennis Tupicoff, Australia. Love is like a chainsaw in this tour-de-force, twisting a chain of stories about power tool safety, bullfighting, and Frank-and-Ava celebrity romance. (25 mins.)

In turn-of-the-century Paris, Madame de... (we never learn her name) sells her earrings—a wedding present from her husband the General—to erase a gambling debt. The jeweler betrays her and sells them back to the General, who gives them to his mistress, but she gambles them away, too. When Madame de's true love, the Baron (the great Vittorio de Sica), presents the earrings to her, the jewels take on a deeper meaning as the web of deception unravels in this Oscar-nominated classic.

Newly 35m restored print.

California artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was the modern master of found footage filmmaking. During his 40-year career—first as a pioneer of assemblage art and then as a heralded moving-image maker—he created a unique body of work that examined American society with wit and clarity of vision. His carefully edited montage films, informed by his sculptural practice, draw upon sources as varied as educational films, newsreel footage and television commercials, finding new power and associations in discarded or forgotten images. We welcome Michelle Silva, a representative of the Conner Family Estate, for two programs of works that resonate in surprising ways with American popular culture.

PROGRAM I

MEA CULPA (1981). Using footage from educational films, Conner collaborated with David Byrne and Brian Eno on a visual interpretation of their album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.” (4 mins.)

COSMIC RAY (1961). Channeling the “black magic” of Ray Charles’ music, occult symbols, and mysterious images fashion a raucous meditation. (4 mins.)

A MOVIE (1958). Conner’s found footage classic summarizes and critiques the history of modern cinema. (12 mins.)

REPORT (1967). Haunted by JFK’s assassination, Conner obsessively filmed television coverage of the killing and funeral, as well as miscellaneous contemporary TV programs, and repurposed the footage into both a sorrowful portrait of a lost hero and a blistering critique of postwar consumerism. (13 mins.)

BREAKAWAY (1966). Shot at multiple speeds, forwards and backwards, this dance film uses rapid-fire images to respond to Maya Deren’s motion studies. (5 mins.)

VIVIAN (1964). A portrait of actress Vivian Kurz, filmed in part at a 1964 show of Conner’s art, set to Conway Twitty's version of "Mona Lisa." (4 mins.)

10 SECOND FILM (1965). Conner’s trailer for the New York Film Festival, rejected for being “too fast.” (10 sec.)

MARILYN TIMES FIVE (1968-73). A response to structural cinema that appropriates a performance by Marilyn Monroe imitator Arline Hunter. (14 mins.)

HIS EYE IS ON THE SPARROW (2006). Distilling footage from his unfinished documentary on the gospel group the Soul Stirrers, Conner fashions a collage accompaniment to the group’s version of a classic spiritual. (4 mins.)

California artist and filmmaker Bruce Conner (1933-2008) was the modern master of found footage filmmaking. During his 40-year career—first as a pioneer of assemblage art and then as a heralded moving-image maker—he created a unique body of work that examined American society with wit and clarity of vision. His carefully edited montage films, informed by his sculptural practice, draw upon sources as varied as educational films, newsreel footage and television commercials, finding new power and associations in discarded or forgotten images. We welcome Michelle Silva, a representative of the Conner Family Estate, for two programs of works that resonate in surprising ways with American popular culture.

PROGRAM II - CLINTON STREET THEATER

MONGOLOID (1978). A hilarious “educational” film that features a pulsing Devo soundtrack. (4 mins.)

AMERICA IS WAITING (1981). Working with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Conner’s early music video offers a satire of patriotism and national security. (4 mins.)

TAKE THE 5:10 TO DREAMLAND (1977). An oneiric, autobiographical chapter in Conner’s cinema with a mysterious, evocative soundtrack by Patrick Gleeson. (5 mins.)

CROSSROADS (1976). Conner “expanded” 27 different shots of the 1946 Bikini Atoll a-bomb test footage into a mesmerizing two-part epic, scored with the enhanced “realism” of Patrick Gleeson’s music in the first half, and the hallucinatory trance music of Terry Riley in the second. (36 mins.)

VALSE TRISTE (1979). This poetic found-footage memoir is a lyrical companion piece to 5:10 TO DREAMLAND. (5 mins.)

LOOKING FOR MUSHROOMS (1966). Using footage of his travels in Mexico and his early years in San Francisco, Conner radically slows down the original material—by adding five frames per shot—to craft a hypnotic superimposition of two worlds. (15 mins.)

EASTER MORNING (2008). Conner’s final work is a step-printed reinterpretation of footage from his 1966 unreleased film EASTER MORNING RAGA, and reveals his interest in the psychedelic as an alternate way of seeing. (10 mins.)

PROGRAM II will screen at the Portland Documentary and eXperimental Film Festival at the Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton St. Tickets will be available at the Clinton Street Theater box office on the day of the show.

PDX Fest Information: www.peripheralproduce.com

Honigmann (FOREVER, METAL AND MELANCHOLY, O AMOUR NATURAL) is one of the world’s most skilled and empathetic filmmakers, and her extraordinary talent is apparent again in her fascinating portrait of Lima, Peru's capital city. Revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, she explores how many of its poorest citizens have survived decades of corruption, economic crisis, and injustice. OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, waiters, vendors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts and jugglers (some mere children) who perform at traffic stops. The film also visits with small business owners, from a leather-goods repairman and presidential sash manufacturer to a frog-juice vendor, and contrasts their work environments with the reality of their homes in the slums of the city's surrounding hillsides. As Honigmann introduces us to the everyday reality of Lima, she celebrates a people who, albeit politically powerless, have resisted being consigned to oblivion.

INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR HEDDY HONIGMANN

Martine Carol stars as the legendary Spanish courtesan and adventuress whose lovers included Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria. Lola’s life and loves are recalled by the circus master (Peter Ustinov) who made this beguiling beauty his central attraction. The final film from master stylist Ophüls features his trademark long takes and steadily moving camera, as well as a sharp and relevant critique on the culture of celebrity. This stunning new edition of LOLA MONTÈS restores the film’s original stereo soundtrack and brings Ophüls' remarkable color scheme back to life. “Back in 1962, I hailed LOLA MONTÈS as the greatest film of all time, and I stand by that judgment.”—Andrew Sarris, The Village Voice. “One of the essential films ... Beautiful and heartbreaking.”—David Thomson.

Godard said that “all you need in the movies is a gun and a girl,” and so it is with MADE IN USA, Godard’s final collaboration with Anna Karina. Karina is Paula Nelson, a female version of Humphrey Bogart (the film itself was inspired by THE BIG SLEEP), wrapped in the trademark trench coat with the necessary gun in hand. When her former fiancé turns up dead, both the cops and the underworld take an interest in her. Boldly cartoonish, from its color schemes to its quotation-marked characters to its treatment of screen violence, MADE IN USA is dedicated to American crime movies (specifically those of Sam Fuller and Nicolas Ray), and is a politically fueled deconstruction of the genre.

Newly restored print.

A carnivalesque portrait of provincial Italy during the Fascist period, Fellini's most personal film satirizes his youth in Rimini and turns daily life into a circus of social rituals, adolescent desires, male fantasies, and political subterfuge, all set to Nina Rota’s nostalgia-tinged score. “A film of exhilarating beauty… as full of tales as Scheherazade, some romantic, some slapstick, some elegiac, some bawdy, some as mysterious as the unexpected sight of a peacock flying through a light snowfall.” —Vincent Canby, The New York Times. Academy Award, Best Foreign Film.

“Often overlooked, Truffaut’s wonderful second film—sandwiched between art-house evergreens THE 400 BLOWS and JULES AND JIM—stars Charles Aznavour, master of the chanson, in his only collaboration with the director. The slight singer-songwriter, playing Charlie, an ivory-tickler at a dive who abandoned his career as a celebrated concert pianist after a family tragedy, may not be so indelibly associated with Truffaut as Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel, but he’s just as heartbreaking. An adaptation of David Goodis’ 1965 novel ‘Down There,’ this film more than nods to noir: Charlie is on the lam because he killed in self-defense. Truffaut said he made it in reaction to THE 400 BLOWS, which he deemed ‘so French,’ adding that he ‘needed to show that he was influenced by American cinema.'”—Melissa Anderson, Time Out New York.

Newly restored print.

One of Truffaut’s most personal and widely admired films, THE WILD CHILD is based on the journals of Dr. Jean Itard (played by Truffaut himself), an 18th-century physician who set out to raise and educate a “wolf boy” found in the forests of southern France. Much of the film’s complexity and power derives from the way that Truffaut identifies with both the good doctor’s faith in civilization and the “noble savage’s” resistance to civilization. Nestor Almendros’s luminous black-and-white cinematography dazzles anew in this restored print.

Boyle’s (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE) break-out feature follows three friends—sensible nurse Kerry Fox, uptight accountant Christopher Eccleston, and cutting-edge journalist Ewan MacGregor—as they interview candidates for a fourth flatmate. After accepting enigmatic Keith Allen as their new roomie, things soon wax nightmarish when he turns up dead with a roomful of drugs and money. The three comrades decide to cut up the body and dispose of it themselves, thus enabling them to keep the wads of illicit cash. But things don’t go as planned in this "tar-black comedy that zings along on a wave of visual and scripting inventiveness… a real tour de force of black humor, with multiple double-crosses and twists up to the final fadeout."—Variety.

SINGLE OR DOUBLE FEATURE (Double feature with TRAINSPOTTING)

Double features cost an additional $2 to stay for both films. To purchase an advanced ticket for the double feature, be sure to select the DOUBLE FEATURE rather than the single ticket.

Ewan McGregor heads up a memorable cast as a young man struggling with his love/hate relationship with drugs, principally heroin. Boyle and screenwriter John Hodge capture all the camaraderie, angst, backstabbing, horror, and gutter humor of a subculture of misanthropic misfits doing whatever it takes to cancel out, or at least postpone, personal responsibility. "Dark as its subject matter is, this film manages the incredible trick of remaining jubilant and fresh. And in the face of AIDS, crib death, drug overdose, and staggeringly vile bathroom jokes (all of which figure in the story), that is no small feat…Boyle elicits disarmingly droll performances all around."—Janet Maslin, The New York Times.

SINGLE OR DOUBLE FEATURE (Double feature with SHALLOW GRAVE)

Double features cost an additional $2 to stay for both films. To purchase an advanced ticket for the double feature, be sure to select the DOUBLE FEATURE rather than the single ticket.