The world’s first film festival took place in Venice, Italy in 1932, brainchild of Giuseppe Volti, Minister of Finance for Italian leader Benito Mussolini. Before long the event was politicized to celebrate films from Fascist Italy and Germany.
In response, France announced plans to host a more democratic cinema conclave in Cannes. Scheduled for September 1,1939, the Cannes Festival was eclipsed by Adolf Hitler, who on that morning invaded Poland, instigating World War II. Not all festivals have a political agenda.
Since its birth in 1992 as the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, what is now called the Philadelphia Film Festival (PFF) embarked on a non-ideological mission that most moviegoers, whatever their politics, can embrace: It is committed to showing the best movies from around the world — and from around the corner in Philly. Where else could one find both widely discussed Naza, a documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in which they interview members of Israel Defense Forces about their actions in Gaza, and Big Phan, Hoag Kepner’s profile of Tom Burgoyne, the longtime best friend of our one-and-only Philly Phanatic?
The festival opens October 15 with Noah Segan’s disarming The Only Living Pickpocket in New York, starring the delicately grizzled John Turturro as Harry Lehman, its title character, whose sleight-of-hand is as graceful as his gait. Like its lead, the film is spellbinding as it swings between the wistful and the melancholic.
PFF will close on October 25 with Jesse Eisenberg’s The Debut, a musical comedy about community theater starring Julianne Moore as an anxious novice and Paul Giamatti as the troupe’s intimidating director. In between is one of the richest festivals in recent memory.
Andrew Greenblatt, PFF’s CEO, sees the quality of this year’s films as “a sign that the logjam created by Covid and further impacted by the Hollywood Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild strikes is over.” He says, “People are making more movies.”
Having previewed roughly 20 percent of the 143 documentaries, features, and shorts in this fall’s PFF, I am enthusiastic about most of the titles I’ve seen and look forward to watching a large share of those I have not.
Movies I love:
Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s family drama about exiled German author Thomas Mann (Hans Zischler) and daughter, Erika (Sandra Huller), traversing postwar Germany from Frankfurt, in the U.S.-dominated West to Weimar in the Communist-dominated East. A tightly-wound vignette about a father and daughter who, in the end, unwind.
In 1972 William Greaves, the documentarian, PBS news producer and occasional actor, convened a Harlem Renaissance reunion in the apartment of Duke Ellington. There were musicians Noble Sissle and Eubie Blake, James Van Der Zee, the photographer who chronicled the Renaissance, poet and novelist Arna Bontemps, and dozens more actors, artists, educators, producers, writers free-styling about the cultural movement. Thank Greaves’ son, David (who was there as a cinematographer), and granddaughter, Liani, who preserved and edited this joyous chronicle.
South Korea filmmaker Lee Chan-dong’s riveting tale of two Seoul couples. One consists of a depressed machinist laid off after a bitter strike and his cheery wife unable to help him through trauma. The other includes a virtue-signaling documentarian who wants to chronicle their economic struggles and a captain of industry who, though she professes empathy with her subjects, sometimes tends toward exploitation. This delicately layered story exposes classism at its most exploitative.
British cineaste Mike Leigh’s portrait of social workers in West London, is a movie of rare heart and humor. I didn’t want it to end. To be in the company of these overworked, underpaid and deeply sympathetic characters played by Kate O’Flynn, Marion Bailey, and Alice Bailey Johnson is a gift.
PFF movies I want to see:
Nigerian filmmakers Arie and Chuko Esiri reimagine Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway in contemporary Lagos. In the stream-of-consciousness story where past and present flow between each other, Sophie Okenodo plays the title character, preparing for an elegant house party while reflecting upon how her youthful decisions resulted in her current regrets. With David Oyewelo.
Danny Boyle’s tale of how Rupert Murdoch (Guy Pearce) hired the newsman Larry Lamb (Jack O’Connell) to help transform the British tabloid, The Sun, marking the beginning of the end of Fleet Street.
Cristian Mungiu’s drama of a Romanian family that moves to Norway, and the neighbors increasingly suspicious of the newcomers to their village.
Ava DuVernay’s timely look into the 14th Amendment promising Americans birthright citizenship, due process, and equal rights that since its adoption in 1868 has been a subject of debate and divisiveness.
Naza, the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage,” was shot in Tel Aviv during the ongoing Gaza war. It is a series of interviews with unidentified Israeli soldiers who detail how they launched the airstrikes that killed thousands of civilians. Its Israeli co-directors have been denounced by political and military leadership in their country — and attracted the attention of film critics and audiences worldwide.
A movie that reliable sources love, love, love but I have not yet seen:
Comedian Jordan Firstman wrote, directed and stars in his debut feature about a gay, 30-ish Brooklyn party animal and club promoter who learns that he’s a dad … of a 10-year-old son. Sounds like Baby Boom and I’m here for it.
A vintage movie that I love, love, love but not everyone has seen:
Written on the Wind (1956)
It’s the 70th anniversary of Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor 70mm melodrama starring Robert Stack and Dorothy Malone as the spawn of a Texas oil millionaire. He’s an alcoholic. She’s a nymphomaniac. Everything gets more intense — and intensely Technicolored — when his crush, Lauren Bacall, elopes with her crush, Rock Hudson. It’s a movie that launched a million soap operas.
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