New Directors/New Films, New York

March 26–April 6, 2008

New Directors/New Films (ND/NF) is the single most important film survey in North America. It is programmed by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center together to showcase emerging and demanding cinema that sounds the clarion call for the Future of Film. Not bound by a conventional definition of "emerging," curators rather choose films of merit that otherwise would rarely have a chance to be seen.

Danielle Arbid's A Lost Man

(LN/FR, 2007) is ND/NF's most challenging film. Challenging be cause it humanizes Arab men and women in a way rarely seen in Western cinema. The gaze is secular, female, and Arab. Despite Arbid's declaration that she "is not interested in either politics or gender," the film itself speaks the language of political domination, fundamentalist policing of gender and sexual activity, politics of objectification, and the cause and effects of emotional and economical plunder. Arbid seems schooled in the sensuality of Henry Miller rather than in the rejection of sentimentality of Anaïs Nin. She bravely breaks taboo by showing Arab female prostitutes enjoying their sexual work. They reject any notion of victimization. She also navigates the conflicting feelings these women have for both the Western man (here a French photographer who, vampire-like—a postmodern colonial gestalt—seeks to steal the soul of the Arab women with whom he is having sex by photographing them naked during intercourse) and the Arab man, with whom he travels, who feels himself an outsider even in his own community.

Azazel Jacobs's Momma's Man

(US, 2008) is the worst-titled indie film of the year, but it captures the yearning to go home (literally) that a whole generation of twenty- to thirty-somethings are experiencing. Except home here is an artist's loft owned by the director's real artist parents (who play the parents) in this dramatic fiction that seamlessly crosses reality and fantasy. The film shows how dysfunction is not always easily understood and that adulthood is not simply chronologically defined. It offers a new look at the American family dynamic that centers on a very male fear of responsibility and the adolescent nostalgia for being taken care of while rebelling against authority.

Thanos Anastopoulos's Correction

(GR, 2007) is an Athens-based, color-drained, contemporary story of identity, belonging, vengeance, and forgiveness, that echoes classical Greek drama. With minimal dialogue, Anastopoulos creates a canvas of humanity, through light and shadowing reflective of early-twentieth century Italian cinema, and slowly reveals a tale of national identity and fear of immigrants. He captures, in faces, both soul passion and dark emotion. Ostensibly a story of amends about a recently released prisoner, the film challenges the viewer to unravel the mystery of what happened and where fault lies. This is stunning filmmaking that transcends spec ifics of location and resonates as a contemporary nomadic journey through the meaning of ethnic identity in a world made smaller by globalization.

Lucía Puenzo's XXY

(AR/SP/FR, 2007) from Argentina, is the first narrative film to address intersex. This word has replaced hermaphrodite as the politically correct term for a person born with both male and female genitals. Usually one is more dominant than the other. Puenzo one-ups Boys Don't Cry (Kimberly Peirce, US, 1999) with a failed attempt to tell a very serious story of an intersex child whose parents have brought him-her up with little psycho logical or medical intervention. The child is allowed to become a teenager with awakening sexual desire and a serious sex identity problem. Like Boys Don't Cry, Puenzo sensationalizes the subject so an audience can distance itself from the frank reality of a body out of place in the world around it. Puenzo actually uses all the emotional tools of the faux serious, middle-class tele-novella to present a creepy voyeuristic view of a potential suicide situation. She includes an almost obligatory sex scene where the supposed girl mounts an unsuspecting teenage boy, actually penetrating him. Puenzo accommodates the audience's...