list http://www.spout.com/ Recent community activity around Nerakhoon (The Betrayal) on Spout Copyright 2005-9 Spout, LLC Spout RSS http://www.spout.com/images/SpoutLogoRSS.jpg http://www.spout.com/ 136 30 http://www.spout.com/films/Nerakhoon_The_Betrayal/358647/default.aspx Title: Nerakhoon (The Betrayal)
Year: 2008
Director: Ellen Kuras, Thavisouk Phrasavath
Plot: In this documentary, filmmaker Thavisouk Phrasavath details the painful story of how he and is family faced hardship and poverty as Laotian refugees during the Vietnam war. Combining interviews and archival footage, Phrasavath explores not only the experience of betrayal that his family endured when they were forced to flee their homeland, but the larger scheme of geopolitics that put the events into play. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide
Times Tagged: 1
Number of Lists: 3
Number of blog posts: 10
Number of discussion threads: 1
SpoutRating: 4
]]>Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:02:04 GMTNerakhoon (The Betrayal)2008Ellen Kuras, Thavisouk PhrasavathIn this documentary, filmmaker Thavisouk Phrasavath details the painful story of how he and is family faced hardship and poverty as Laotian refugees during the Vietnam war. Combining interviews and archival footage, Phrasavath explores not only the experience of betrayal that his family endured when they were forced to flee their homeland, but the larger scheme of geopolitics that put the events into play. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide1Slightly Tagged (1-5)31014http://www.spout.com/ProductImages/s358647.jpghttp://www.spout.com/films/Nerakhoon_The_Betrayal/358647/default.aspxFilm http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/6/9/42583.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 6/9/2009 10:02:04 AM
Body: This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today. Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as Polish-American embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of their family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t like it and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn from Walt the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness, while simultaneously fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess, and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:02:04 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog6/9/2009 10:02:04 AM This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today. Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as Polish-American embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of their family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t like it and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn from Walt the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness, while simultaneously fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess, and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/6/9/42582.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 6/9/2009 10:01:51 AM
Body: This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today. Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as Polish-American embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of their family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t like it and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn from Walt the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness, while simultaneously fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess, and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:01:51 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com6/9/2009 10:01:51 AM This review was originally published during Gran Torino’s theatrical run. The movie comes out on DVD today. Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution . Up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much, but it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as Polish-American embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of their family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t like it and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn from Walt the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness, while simultaneously fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess, and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2009/2/27/40731.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 2/27/2009 6:02:34 PM
Body: “It often seems that when there isn’t an obvious, populist pick in the Academy’s documentary feature category (such as Bowling for Columbine, March of the Penguins or An Inconvenient Truth), the field is rife for an upset,” points out Kris Tapley. This may, he suggests, be evidence enough that James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the presumed frontrunner in the Oscar Best Documentary category, is vulnerable to an upset. That makes sense. Slightly more aggravating: the substance behind Tapley’s suggestion that Wire doesn’t deserve to win. “Having finally viewed all of the nominees, I can’t deny how impactful each of the other contenders is,” Tapley writes. “Furthermore, James Marsh’s film is largely composed of talking head interviews and pre-existing footage, not to mention dubious reenactments. Each of the other contenders, meanwhile, are the result of original filmmaking.” I agree that Encounters at the End of the World and The Betrayal are qualitatively more interesting films (I haven’t seen The Garden). My questions: what is it about Trouble the Water’s handicam verite that qualifies as the more “original filmmaking”, and what qualifies the reenactments in Wire –– which I thought were subtle, artful, and necessary –– as “dubious”? “Dubious” is a word that Tapley uses a lot. Remembering that he used it to describe my review of Dear Zachary, I did a search for “dubious” on his site, and saw that the phrase “dubious reenactments” also popped up in his review of the Oscar shortlisted film Blessed is the Match. So now I’m wondering if that word means what I think it means. In any case, I’ve lost my share of Oscar pools thanks to surprises in the Best Documentary category, so I’m on board with the concept that Man on Wire may not be a safe bet. And as much respect as that film deserves, I’d rather see Werner Herzog win, not just for the brilliance of Encounters, but for his entire nonfiction filmmaking career. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:02:34 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog2/27/2009 6:02:34 PM“It often seems that when there isn’t an obvious, populist pick in the Academy’s documentary feature category (such as Bowling for Columbine, March of the Penguins or An Inconvenient Truth), the field is rife for an upset,” points out Kris Tapley. This may, he suggests, be evidence enough that James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the presumed frontrunner in the Oscar Best Documentary category, is vulnerable to an upset. That makes sense. Slightly more aggravating: the substance behind Tapley’s suggestion that Wire doesn’t deserve to win. “Having finally viewed all of the nominees, I can’t deny how impactful each of the other contenders is,” Tapley writes. “Furthermore, James Marsh’s film is largely composed of talking head interviews and pre-existing footage, not to mention dubious reenactments. Each of the other contenders, meanwhile, are the result of original filmmaking.” I agree that Encounters at the End of the World and The Betrayal are qualitatively more interesting films (I haven’t seen The Garden). My questions: what is it about Trouble the Water’s handicam verite that qualifies as the more “original filmmaking”, and what qualifies the reenactments in Wire –– which I thought were subtle, artful, and necessary –– as “dubious”? “Dubious” is a word that Tapley uses a lot. Remembering that he used it to describe my review of Dear Zachary, I did a search for “dubious” on his site, and saw that the phrase “dubious reenactments” also popped up in his review of the Oscar shortlisted film Blessed is the Match. So now I’m wondering if that word means what I think it means. In any case, I’ve lost my share of Oscar pools thanks to surprises in the Best Documentary category, so I’m on board with the concept that Man on Wire may not be a safe bet. And as much respect as that film deserves, I’d rather see Werner Herzog win, not just for the brilliance of Encounters, but for his entire nonfiction filmmaking career. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2009/2/27/40692.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 2/27/2009 6:01:33 PM
Body: The International Documentary Association threw a party for and tribute to the filmmakers nominated for Oscars for short and feature length non-fiction films last night, and most of the best jokes of the night had to do with Man on Wire’s star wirewalker Philippe Petit. Sort of. In introducing a clip from the film, host Lily Tomlin asked, “What does it take to be arrested for the crime of the century? Apparently more than a meltdown on the set of I Heart Huckabees.” Cue insidery guffaws. Earlier in the evening, IDA’s Eddie Schmidt tossed off a Petit joke that was less funny ha-ha than funny remarkable as an answer to a thrown gauntlet. Without naming names, Schmidt responded to Alexandra Pelosi’s claim to the New York Times that “it’s like a dirty little secret” that documentaries “are boring.” In the same story, Pelosi also proudly declared that she won’t make films longer than standard broadcast length, and refuses to submit them to film festivals — thus marking her supposed populism in firm opposition to the entire cinematic ethos that IDA was celebrating. Schmidt offered a rousing rebuttal: “The only person who is allowed to say that anything is boring is Philippe Petit, because he has walked on a tightrope between two buildings.” Since nominee Werner Herzog was absent, Petit (seen above, apparently praying for a miniature version of the man behind him) was the most charismatic character in the room, and even after a year on the festival circuit, he and director James Marsh inspired a standing ovation. But it was a clip from Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World — the scene where the demented penguin goes his own way towards certain death — that got the biggest laugh of the night. Herzog’s schtick may sometimes seem to be bordering on self-parody these days, but the material it produces doesn’t get old. Meanwhile, chatter over wine and tomato soup before the tribute program kept circling back to the recent sudden changes at Sundance. More than one person I talked express some degree of bemusement over a non-sourced, sort-of charticle on The Wrap, pegging Sundance programmers John Cooper and Trevor Groth, former AFI programmer Shaz Bennett (whose name The Wrap misspelled) and sometime Sundance programmer and current Without a Box guy Christian Gaines as the top contenders for Geoff Gilmore’s abandoned post. Cooper and Groth were at the event last night, but if either knew the what the future holds for their festival, they weren’t saying. When the topic came up, Groth simply smiled and said, “We live in exciting times.” More pictures from the event after the jump. The Trouble the Water team: cinematographer PJ Raval, directors Carl Deal & Tia Lessin, and producer Amir Bar-Lev. James Marsh, The Betrayal director/cinematographer Ellen Kuras and editor/subject Thavisouk Phrasavath. Matt Dentler of Cinetic Digital Rights Management, Rachel Rosen of FIND Independet/Los Angeles Film Festival, and filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Fri, 27 Feb 2009 23:01:33 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com2/27/2009 6:01:33 PMThe International Documentary Association threw a party for and tribute to the filmmakers nominated for Oscars for short and feature length non-fiction films last night, and most of the best jokes of the night had to do with Man on Wire’s star wirewalker Philippe Petit. Sort of. In introducing a clip from the film, host Lily Tomlin asked, “What does it take to be arrested for the crime of the century? Apparently more than a meltdown on the set of I Heart Huckabees.” Cue insidery guffaws. Earlier in the evening, IDA’s Eddie Schmidt tossed off a Petit joke that was less funny ha-ha than funny remarkable as an answer to a thrown gauntlet. Without naming names, Schmidt responded to Alexandra Pelosi’s claim to the New York Times that “it’s like a dirty little secret” that documentaries “are boring.” In the same story, Pelosi also proudly declared that she won’t make films longer than standard broadcast length, and refuses to submit them to film festivals — thus marking her supposed populism in firm opposition to the entire cinematic ethos that IDA was celebrating. Schmidt offered a rousing rebuttal: “The only person who is allowed to say that anything is boring is Philippe Petit, because he has walked on a tightrope between two buildings.” Since nominee Werner Herzog was absent, Petit (seen above, apparently praying for a miniature version of the man behind him) was the most charismatic character in the room, and even after a year on the festival circuit, he and director James Marsh inspired a standing ovation. But it was a clip from Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World — the scene where the demented penguin goes his own way towards certain death — that got the biggest laugh of the night. Herzog’s schtick may sometimes seem to be bordering on self-parody these days, but the material it produces doesn’t get old. Meanwhile, chatter over wine and tomato soup before the tribute program kept circling back to the recent sudden changes at Sundance. More than one person I talked express some degree of bemusement over a non-sourced, sort-of charticle on The Wrap, pegging Sundance programmers John Cooper and Trevor Groth, former AFI programmer Shaz Bennett (whose name The Wrap misspelled) and sometime Sundance programmer and current Without a Box guy Christian Gaines as the top contenders for Geoff Gilmore’s abandoned post. Cooper and Groth were at the event last night, but if either knew the what the future holds for their festival, they weren’t saying. When the topic came up, Groth simply smiled and said, “We live in exciting times.” More pictures from the event after the jump. The Trouble the Water team: cinematographer PJ Raval, directors Carl Deal & Tia Lessin, and producer Amir Bar-Lev. James Marsh, The Betrayal director/cinematographer Ellen Kuras and editor/subject Thavisouk Phrasavath. Matt Dentler of Cinetic Digital Rights Management, Rachel Rosen of FIND Independet/Los Angeles Film Festival, and filmmaker/blogger AJ Schnack. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/12/18/38539.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 12/18/2008 11:01:33 AM
Body: Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution –– although up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much. But it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of the family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness under Walt’s wing, while fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess,  and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:01:33 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog12/18/2008 11:01:33 AMOf Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution –– although up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much. But it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of the family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness under Walt’s wing, while fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess,  and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/12/18/38538.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 12/18/2008 11:01:19 AM
Body: Of Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution –– although up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much. But it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of the family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness under Walt’s wing, while fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess,  and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:01:19 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com12/18/2008 11:01:19 AMOf Clint Eastwood’s two 2008 directorial efforts, Gran Torino is by far the “better” film, in that it’s the picture that’s vastly more entertaining and much less clumsy in execution –– although up against the monumentally ill-conceived Changeling, that’s not saying much. But it is worth saying that the things about this end-of-year entry that are appealing are extremely appealing. In drawing the conflict in a broke-down Midwestern suburb between the white ethnic stragglers who originally gentrified it, and the non-white ethnic groups who have more recently moved in and made it their own, Nick Schenk’s script is gleefully unafraid to go to extremes. Eastwood’s starring performance, which requires him to be on-screen, often alone, for a good 90% of the picture, has been lauded as a career high, but this might stem from a kind of “Whoops –– if not now, when?” collective guilt; the fact is; the man is clearly running out of runway to be honored on. Again, what’s interesting about what Eastwood does on camera it is not nuance or technique, but the willingness to go balls out, to turn every casually racist wisecrack up to 11 and to crank out every unnecessarily externalized shard of internal monologue with the subtlety of burlesque. Gran Torino is thus most fun when it’s working on the level of performance art, and much of the time, it resembles an art school take on an insult comic’s one-man show. A good third of this film consists of Clint, as embittered widower and haunted Korean War veteran Walt, sitting on the porch of his modest Michigan home, slugging one PBR after another and seething out loud to no one in particular about the “fish eyes” and “zipperheads” who have moved in next door. When said “gooks” (actually Hmong immigrants displaced by the Vietnam war, thus connecting this film in liminal political/historical interest to Ellen Kuras’ far superior doc, The Betrayal) are threatened by a gang including at least one member of the family, the fight spills onto Walt’s yard, and the crazy old racist responds in the only way he knows how: he pulls out a shotgun and growls, “Get off my lawn.” Whether Walt likes it or not (and, predictably, at first he doesn’t and then he kind of does and then he really does), the 20-ish Hmong kids he accidentally saved see the aggro Mr. Wilson act as something heroic, and soon a line is drawn in the sand: the good gooks who just want to get their slice of the American dream without having to do much assimilation learn the old school tricks of getting along while maintaining a fierce opposition to melting pot political correctness under Walt’s wing, while fending off the aggressions and provocations of the new school immigrant class, for whom prison is a finishing school and “I don’t want to join your gang, thanks,” isn’t a satisfactory answer. All that is fine, as far as it goes, and if Eastwood and Schenk had stopped there, with a character study riding the fine line between self-parody and exaggerated truth, it would be a lot easier to take Gran Torino seriously. But instead, drunk on its own excess, the film plunges into pure fantasy in a third act that’s impossible to analyze without using spoilers to describe. Suffice it to say, the crazy old racist teaches the fish people a little something about life … and death. In the end, the only thing that’s shocking about Gran Torino is that it seems that no one in this community bothered to learn anything about anyone else until the day Eastwood’s camera started rolling. Not only does Walt not know how to pronounce the specific breed of “Chinamen” who have taken over his once-Polish block, but his own kids bumble around him, attempt to appeal to a common consumerist generoisty which he clearly doesn’t possess,  and recoil at his crudeness, as if expecting something else entirely. This seems like not so much of an accident on the part of Eastwood and Schenk, but their deliberate play at pitching Gran Torino above their predicted critique. If you create a world in which none of your characters seem to really know one another –– to the extent where even an old man’s grown children seem surprised by his every gruff rumble and emotional deficiency — then you essentially buy yourself the luxury of having no one within the film space to call bullshit. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/11/19/37440.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 11/19/2008 12:01:15 PM
Body: Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead. Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy. When Thavi was a child growing up in a huge family in Laos, his father was recruited to work intelligence within that country’s secret, CIA-financed and trained military — a military which dropped US bombs (more bombs in a single year than in World Wars I and II combined) on its own country, a military whose men were left hanging when the US abruptly exited Laos and allowed the country to be taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao.  When Thavi’s father was arrested as an enemy of the state in 1975 and taken to a “re-education” camp, the family left behind were surveiled in their own home, and eldest son Thavi was routinely taken in for questioning. “We weren’t one of them anymore,” Thavi’s mom remembers. At age 12, Thavi’s grandmother read his fortune, and determined that he must leave Laos immediately. So the preteen swam across the Mekong River to Thailand, where he lived as a “street kid” for two years until his family–save for two older sisters who wouldn’t fit in the boat, and their father, who was assumed to have been executed–joined him. Soon what was left of the Phrasavath family made their way, with the help of a refugee agency, to Brooklyn. As the de facto head of the household once the family settled in a cramped tenement next to a crack house in Flatbush (and the family’s most fluent English-speaker), Thavi takes on much of the storytelling duty for the second half of the film, describing the family’s culture shock and initial confusion over how to deal with basic life needs, both of which converged and were embodied by Thavi’s apparently frequent trips to a Prospect Park pond to fish for dinner. But it’s his mother Orady whose testimony provides the film’s emotional and spiritual center. Thavi’s father and the other Laotian soldiers, she tells us, “were really willing to die for the Americans, but they [the US] just left in the middle of the war.” And so Orady really believed it when, back in Laos, she told Thavi that the “US government will take care of us in America” in exchange for what she they perceived as the Phrasavath’s employer/employee relationship with the US. Having also heard that the United States was a magical land where “water flows in every house, light shines in every room,” where “if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven,” the decision to come here from their war-decimated homeland was a no brainer. But years later, she concludes, “life in America is hell on Earth.” The Phrasavath family essentially hopped from one stifling climate of fear to another. At least back in Laos, they knew the language, knew the social customs, knew the rules. In Brooklyn, they lived in abject poverty, and paralyzed by fear of the various Asian gangs. As her children struggle to accept and then get through the day-to-day (one of Thavi’s sisters survives a sexual assault at the hands of gang members; another family member isn’t as lucky), Orady never quite gets over the culture shock, and desperately laments the way the transport of her family has divided them generationaly. “The time will come when the universe will shake. The children will escape, blowing like the wind. The wisdom and value of human life will be lost,” she reads from an ancient Lao prophecy, over footage of the modern, hooligan teenagers who rule the Brooklyn streets. Not only were they promised heaven and put through hell, but for this family, what they perceive as the betrayal of the US government first after the war and then after their own immigration is tantamount to bringing upon a fall of civilization 5000 years in the making. And then it gets personal. One day Thavi picks up the phone to learn that his father is, in fact, alive. The long-gone patriarch rejoins the family in Brooklyn, and at first all is good. He even gives an interview for the film, talking-head style, in which he rails against the US government for betraying him and his fellow soldiers. And then he tells Orady, Thavi and the sisters that he has to leave, for reasons that are probably left unspoiled, but which instill in his waiting the family the anger, resentment, and loss he himself felt over being abandoned by the US. This familial betrayal takes over the political betrayal, and leaves the deeper scar. 20 years of hopes and wishes and struggles and grudges, are condensed down into a single, discreet, but permanently devastating disappointment. Rather than offering answers for the Phrasavath family’s predicaments or suggesting an outlets for their sadness or rage, Kuras just keeps showing up, and allows the story to unfold at the speed of memory. Like a painting with blurred edges, there is no hard start or finish to a story like The Betrayal — the past continues to reverberate, the present contiues to challenge, pain never goes away. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:01:15 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog11/19/2008 12:01:15 PM Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead. Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy. When Thavi was a child growing up in a huge family in Laos, his father was recruited to work intelligence within that country’s secret, CIA-financed and trained military — a military which dropped US bombs (more bombs in a single year than in World Wars I and II combined) on its own country, a military whose men were left hanging when the US abruptly exited Laos and allowed the country to be taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao.  When Thavi’s father was arrested as an enemy of the state in 1975 and taken to a “re-education” camp, the family left behind were surveiled in their own home, and eldest son Thavi was routinely taken in for questioning. “We weren’t one of them anymore,” Thavi’s mom remembers. At age 12, Thavi’s grandmother read his fortune, and determined that he must leave Laos immediately. So the preteen swam across the Mekong River to Thailand, where he lived as a “street kid” for two years until his family–save for two older sisters who wouldn’t fit in the boat, and their father, who was assumed to have been executed–joined him. Soon what was left of the Phrasavath family made their way, with the help of a refugee agency, to Brooklyn. As the de facto head of the household once the family settled in a cramped tenement next to a crack house in Flatbush (and the family’s most fluent English-speaker), Thavi takes on much of the storytelling duty for the second half of the film, describing the family’s culture shock and initial confusion over how to deal with basic life needs, both of which converged and were embodied by Thavi’s apparently frequent trips to a Prospect Park pond to fish for dinner. But it’s his mother Orady whose testimony provides the film’s emotional and spiritual center. Thavi’s father and the other Laotian soldiers, she tells us, “were really willing to die for the Americans, but they [the US] just left in the middle of the war.” And so Orady really believed it when, back in Laos, she told Thavi that the “US government will take care of us in America” in exchange for what she they perceived as the Phrasavath’s employer/employee relationship with the US. Having also heard that the United States was a magical land where “water flows in every house, light shines in every room,” where “if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven,” the decision to come here from their war-decimated homeland was a no brainer. But years later, she concludes, “life in America is hell on Earth.” The Phrasavath family essentially hopped from one stifling climate of fear to another. At least back in Laos, they knew the language, knew the social customs, knew the rules. In Brooklyn, they lived in abject poverty, and paralyzed by fear of the various Asian gangs. As her children struggle to accept and then get through the day-to-day (one of Thavi’s sisters survives a sexual assault at the hands of gang members; another family member isn’t as lucky), Orady never quite gets over the culture shock, and desperately laments the way the transport of her family has divided them generationaly. “The time will come when the universe will shake. The children will escape, blowing like the wind. The wisdom and value of human life will be lost,” she reads from an ancient Lao prophecy, over footage of the modern, hooligan teenagers who rule the Brooklyn streets. Not only were they promised heaven and put through hell, but for this family, what they perceive as the betrayal of the US government first after the war and then after their own immigration is tantamount to bringing upon a fall of civilization 5000 years in the making. And then it gets personal. One day Thavi picks up the phone to learn that his father is, in fact, alive. The long-gone patriarch rejoins the family in Brooklyn, and at first all is good. He even gives an interview for the film, talking-head style, in which he rails against the US government for betraying him and his fellow soldiers. And then he tells Orady, Thavi and the sisters that he has to leave, for reasons that are probably left unspoiled, but which instill in his waiting the family the anger, resentment, and loss he himself felt over being abandoned by the US. This familial betrayal takes over the political betrayal, and leaves the deeper scar. 20 years of hopes and wishes and struggles and grudges, are condensed down into a single, discreet, but permanently devastating disappointment. Rather than offering answers for the Phrasavath family’s predicaments or suggesting an outlets for their sadness or rage, Kuras just keeps showing up, and allows the story to unfold at the speed of memory. Like a painting with blurred edges, there is no hard start or finish to a story like The Betrayal — the past continues to reverberate, the present contiues to challenge, pain never goes away. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/11/19/37439.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 11/19/2008 12:01:05 PM
Body: Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead. Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy. When Thavi was a child growing up in a huge family in Laos, his father was recruited to work intelligence within that country’s secret, CIA-financed and trained military — a military which dropped US bombs (more bombs in a single year than in World Wars I and II combined) on its own country, a military whose men were left hanging when the US abruptly exited Laos and allowed the country to be taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao.  When Thavi’s father was arrested as an enemy of the state in 1975 and taken to a “re-education” camp, the family left behind were surveiled in their own home, and eldest son Thavi was routinely taken in for questioning. “We weren’t one of them anymore,” Thavi’s mom remembers. At age 12, Thavi’s grandmother read his fortune, and determined that he must leave Laos immediately. So the preteen swam across the Mekong River to Thailand, where he lived as a “street kid” for two years until his family–save for two older sisters who wouldn’t fit in the boat, and their father, who was assumed to have been executed–joined him. Soon what was left of the Phrasavath family made their way, with the help of a refugee agency, to Brooklyn. As the de facto head of the household once the family settled in a cramped tenement next to a crack house in Flatbush (and the family’s most fluent English-speaker), Thavi takes on much of the storytelling duty for the second half of the film, describing the family’s culture shock and initial confusion over how to deal with basic life needs, both of which converged and were embodied by Thavi’s apparently frequent trips to a Prospect Park pond to fish for dinner. But it’s his mother Orady whose testimony provides the film’s emotional and spiritual center. Thavi’s father and the other Laotian soldiers, she tells us, “were really willing to die for the Americans, but they [the US] just left in the middle of the war.” And so Orady really believed it when, back in Laos, she told Thavi that the “US government will take care of us in America” in exchange for what she they perceived as the Phrasavath’s employer/employee relationship with the US. Having also heard that the United States was a magical land where “water flows in every house, light shines in every room,” where “if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven,” the decision to come here from their war-decimated homeland was a no brainer. But years later, she concludes, “life in America is hell on Earth.” The Phrasavath family essentially hopped from one stifling climate of fear to another. At least back in Laos, they knew the language, knew the social customs, knew the rules. In Brooklyn, they lived in abject poverty, and paralyzed by fear of the various Asian gangs. As her children struggle to accept and then get through the day-to-day (one of Thavi’s sisters survives a sexual assault at the hands of gang members; another family member isn’t as lucky), Orady never quite gets over the culture shock, and desperately laments the way the transport of her family has divided them generationaly. “The time will come when the universe will shake. The children will escape, blowing like the wind. The wisdom and value of human life will be lost,” she reads from an ancient Lao prophecy, over footage of the modern, hooligan teenagers who rule the Brooklyn streets. Not only were they promised heaven and put through hell, but for this family, what they perceive as the betrayal of the US government first after the war and then after their own immigration is tantamount to bringing upon a fall of civilization 5000 years in the making. And then it gets personal. One day Thavi picks up the phone to learn that his father is, in fact, alive. The long-gone patriarch rejoins the family in Brooklyn, and at first all is good. He even gives an interview for the film, talking-head style, in which he rails against the US government for betraying him and his fellow soldiers. And then he tells Orady, Thavi and the sisters that he has to leave, for reasons that are probably left unspoiled, but which instill in his waiting the family the anger, resentment, and loss he himself felt over being abandoned by the US. This familial betrayal takes over the political betrayal, and leaves the deeper scar. 20 years of hopes and wishes and struggles and grudges, are condensed down into a single, discreet, but permanently devastating disappointment. Rather than offering answers for the Phrasavath family’s predicaments or suggesting an outlets for their sadness or rage, Kuras just keeps showing up, and allows the story to unfold at the speed of memory. Like a painting with blurred edges, there is no hard start or finish to a story like The Betrayal — the past continues to reverberate, the present contiues to challenge, pain never goes away. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Wed, 19 Nov 2008 17:01:05 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com11/19/2008 12:01:05 PM Nerakhoon (The Betrayal), cinematographer Ellen Kuras‘ documentary directorial debut, was recently named to the Academy’s short list of potential Best Documentary nominees, and it’s certainly deserving. A film over wo decades in the making, its back-story is fairly remarkable. Kuras met her subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, while looking for a Laotian translator for a film she planned to direct about a family from Laos then living in Rochester, NY, but then became so interested in her potential translator’s own refugee story that she turned the camera on him instead. Kuras went on to essentially became a master at her day job accidentally; as she told indieWIRE when the film debuted at Sundance, she started her career as an “an associate producer, an assistant cameraperson on docs, and as an electrician on dramatic films (so that I could learn how to light),” and then as production on Nerakhoon continued on, she found herself “needing to take on other projects in order to pay for it.” Those jobs included shooting commercials directed by people like Spike Lee, and eventually films like I Shot Andy Warhol, Blow, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. And yet The Betrayal remained a resolutely independent, low-to-the-ground personal project. Phrasavath, called “Thavi” on screen, is billed as co-director and editor, and often functioned as Kuras’ only other crew member, acting as “translator, cohort and production assistant.” Together he and Kuras combine freshly-shot 16mm material with archival footage, home video, and what look like ancient home movies into a collage of overlapping images. It’s an approach that fits the film perfectly: this world-class camerawoman has made a handmade document of a global-political story concentrated down into a single, extraordinarily intimate portrait, in which the “bigger” issues are mirrored but ultimately dwarfed by domestic tragedy. When Thavi was a child growing up in a huge family in Laos, his father was recruited to work intelligence within that country’s secret, CIA-financed and trained military — a military which dropped US bombs (more bombs in a single year than in World Wars I and II combined) on its own country, a military whose men were left hanging when the US abruptly exited Laos and allowed the country to be taken over by the Communist Pathet Lao.  When Thavi’s father was arrested as an enemy of the state in 1975 and taken to a “re-education” camp, the family left behind were surveiled in their own home, and eldest son Thavi was routinely taken in for questioning. “We weren’t one of them anymore,” Thavi’s mom remembers. At age 12, Thavi’s grandmother read his fortune, and determined that he must leave Laos immediately. So the preteen swam across the Mekong River to Thailand, where he lived as a “street kid” for two years until his family–save for two older sisters who wouldn’t fit in the boat, and their father, who was assumed to have been executed–joined him. Soon what was left of the Phrasavath family made their way, with the help of a refugee agency, to Brooklyn. As the de facto head of the household once the family settled in a cramped tenement next to a crack house in Flatbush (and the family’s most fluent English-speaker), Thavi takes on much of the storytelling duty for the second half of the film, describing the family’s culture shock and initial confusion over how to deal with basic life needs, both of which converged and were embodied by Thavi’s apparently frequent trips to a Prospect Park pond to fish for dinner. But it’s his mother Orady whose testimony provides the film’s emotional and spiritual center. Thavi’s father and the other Laotian soldiers, she tells us, “were really willing to die for the Americans, but they [the US] just left in the middle of the war.” And so Orady really believed it when, back in Laos, she told Thavi that the “US government will take care of us in America” in exchange for what she they perceived as the Phrasavath’s employer/employee relationship with the US. Having also heard that the United States was a magical land where “water flows in every house, light shines in every room,” where “if you make it this far, you are one step away from heaven,” the decision to come here from their war-decimated homeland was a no brainer. But years later, she concludes, “life in America is hell on Earth.” The Phrasavath family essentially hopped from one stifling climate of fear to another. At least back in Laos, they knew the language, knew the social customs, knew the rules. In Brooklyn, they lived in abject poverty, and paralyzed by fear of the various Asian gangs. As her children struggle to accept and then get through the day-to-day (one of Thavi’s sisters survives a sexual assault at the hands of gang members; another family member isn’t as lucky), Orady never quite gets over the culture shock, and desperately laments the way the transport of her family has divided them generationaly. “The time will come when the universe will shake. The children will escape, blowing like the wind. The wisdom and value of human life will be lost,” she reads from an ancient Lao prophecy, over footage of the modern, hooligan teenagers who rule the Brooklyn streets. Not only were they promised heaven and put through hell, but for this family, what they perceive as the betrayal of the US government first after the war and then after their own immigration is tantamount to bringing upon a fall of civilization 5000 years in the making. And then it gets personal. One day Thavi picks up the phone to learn that his father is, in fact, alive. The long-gone patriarch rejoins the family in Brooklyn, and at first all is good. He even gives an interview for the film, talking-head style, in which he rails against the US government for betraying him and his fellow soldiers. And then he tells Orady, Thavi and the sisters that he has to leave, for reasons that are probably left unspoiled, but which instill in his waiting the family the anger, resentment, and loss he himself felt over being abandoned by the US. This familial betrayal takes over the political betrayal, and leaves the deeper scar. 20 years of hopes and wishes and struggles and grudges, are condensed down into a single, discreet, but permanently devastating disappointment. Rather than offering answers for the Phrasavath family’s predicaments or suggesting an outlets for their sadness or rage, Kuras just keeps showing up, and allows the story to unfold at the speed of memory. Like a painting with blurred edges, there is no hard start or finish to a story like The Betrayal — the past continues to reverberate, the present contiues to challenge, pain never goes away. Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/blogs/karina/archive/2008/11/17/37386.aspx Post By: Karina
Post To: Karina on SpoutBlog
Post Date: 11/17/2008 9:01:42 PM
Body: AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.) The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher). Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth
]]>Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:01:42 GMTKarinaKarina on SpoutBlog11/17/2008 9:01:42 PMAJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.) The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher). Originally posted on:SpoutBlog » Karina Longworth http://www.spout.com/blogs/spoutblog/archive/2008/11/17/37385.aspx Post By: SpoutBlog
Post To: SpoutBlog on spout.com
Post Date: 11/17/2008 9:01:28 PM
Body: AJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.) The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher). Originally posted on:SpoutBlog
]]>Tue, 18 Nov 2008 02:01:28 GMTSpoutBlogSpoutBlog on spout.com11/17/2008 9:01:28 PMAJ Schnack has posted the Academy’s shortlist for the Best Documentary Feature nomination. As expected (at least, by me), Ellen Kuras’ The Betrayal, Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World, Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure, and Sundance winners Man on Wire and Trouble the Wire all made the cut. It’s also nice to see a few smaller films on the list, including In a Dream and They Killed Sister Dorothy. But there are also a few notable omissions, including Religulous and Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, both of which had their semi-secret shortlist qualifying runs at the Creative Entertainment Coliseum Quad on 181 Street in the nosebleed section of New York City. Coincidence?!?? Probably! (For what it’s worth, Expelled, Religulous‘ political polar opposite, also failed to make the cut.) The full list can be found here. Expect chatter and analysis in the days to come (probably not least from the snubbed Bill Maher). Originally posted on:SpoutBlog http://www.spout.com/members/0/tags/war/MemberTagFilms.aspxwar
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