Museum of the Moving Image Kicks Off FIRST LOOK Showcase of International Work Today

OUTSIDE SATAN (HORS SATAN), the breathtaking and provocative new feature directed by Bruno Dumont, will be the opening night film of the Museum of the Moving Image's two-week showcase FIRST LOOK. Tonight's, January 4 screening opens the Museum's second annual showcase for inventive, groundbreaking new international cinema, which includes 26 works-feature-length and short films-from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Thailand, and the United States: a highly selective group of films that are distinguished by their artistic audacity. All of the feature films, and nearly all of the short films, are New York premieres. The series closes on Sunday, January 13, with a program of short films by Kleber Mendonça Filho, the acclaimed Brazilian director of NEIGBORING SOUNDS.

Featured FIRST LOOK filmmakers include established masters such as Thom Andersen (appearing with RECONVERSION on January 12), James Benning (with EASY RIDER on January 6), and Bruno Dumont, and such exciting emerging directors as Joana Preiss (appearing with SIBERIA on January 5), Mati Diop (with a program of short films on January 5), Eloy Enciso (appearing in person with ARRAIANOS on January 5), Nicolás Pereda (appearing in person with GREATEST HITS on January 11), and Philip Scheffner (REVISION on January 12). In addition to Dumont's OUTSIDE SATAN, among the highlights are Benning's EASY RIDER, a landscape film that revisits the locations of Dennis Hopper's 1969 movie; IN The Shadows by Thomas Arslan, a major figure in the Berlin School movement (on January 13); and INORI, Mexican filmmaker González-Rubio's (Alamar) haunting look at an aging Japanese village, produced with the assistance of Japanese director Naomi Kawase, and winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival (on January 6).

FIRST LOOK is curated by Dennis Lim, editor of Moving Image Source, the Museum's multimedia magazine; Rachael Rakes, Assistant Curator of Film; and David Schwartz, Chief Curator. Essays on select films will be published on Moving Image Source (http://movingimagesource.us) in early January.

"Many of the films in this year's edition take the form of journeys-geographical, emotional, and artistic," said David Schwartz. "This is truly a series filled with discoveries, and a great way for adventurous filmgoers to start 2013."

"As with last year's inaugural edition, we wanted to showcase the range of innovation the exists in world cinema today," said Dennis Lim. "And we also wanted to draw attention to films that have fallen through the cracks, like Manuel Mozos's XAVIER, a lost classic of recent Portuguese cinema, and IN The Shadows by Thomas Arslan, a major German director whose work has not been widely shown in the States."

"This year, FIRST LOOK has expanded its breadth, with genre-defying, boundary-pushing works of all forms, demonstrating how cinematic creativity can be found in modes as divergent as action movies and the avant-garde," said Rachael Rakes.

With its debut in 2012, FIRST LOOK was instantly recognized as a vital new addition to New York's film scene, an oasis of thoughtful and provocative filmmaking amid the hype and noise of the awards season. It is a great way for New York filmgoers to start the year, just ahead of the Sundance and Rotterdam film festivals.

FIRST LOOK is presented with support from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beyond Kombucha, Cinema Tropical, Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, The Korea Society, and Pragda.

Tickets for screenings (with the exception of opening night) are included with Museum admission ($12 adults / $9 students and senior citizens). A First Look series pass, allowing the holder admission to the Museum and all First Look screenings for the run of the series is available for $40. All screenings, with the exception of the opening event, are free for Museum members (members receive a discount on opening night tickets). Memberships start at $75 with benefits that include year-round free admission to the Museum and its programs, reservation privileges, and discounts on special programs.

Film Schedule for FIRST LOOK Showcase, today, January 4-13, 2013:

Unless otherwise noted, film screenings take place in the main Moving Image Theater at Museum of the Moving Image, 36-01 35 Avenue (at 37 Street), Astoria, and are included with Museum admission. Advance tickets for some special screenings and events are available online at http://movingimage.us or by calling 718-777-6800.

Opening Night:

OUTSIDE SATAN (HORS SATAN)
Followed by opening reception sponsored by Beyond Kombucha
Friday, January 4th at 7:30 PM
France. Dir. Bruno Dumont. 2011, 110 mins. With David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre. The impassive hero of Dumont's mysterious, monumental parable is a nameless drifter with miraculous powers who seems to exist beyond good and evil. In the stark, desolate hinterlands near the Calais coast, this Jesus-or is it Satan?-figure becomes the protector of an awkward young woman. An opaque spiritual allegory in a breathtaking setting, beautifully photographed in CinemaScope, OUTSIDE SATAN recaptures the elemental power of Dumont's earliest works, LIFE OF JESUS and L'HUMANITE. Like all his best films, it's equal parts provocation and theological inquiry.

Tickets: $12 public/$9 Museum members and free for Silver Screen members and above. Buy tickets in advance online at http://movingimage.us or by calling 718-777-6800.

BIG IN VIETNAM AND OTHER SHORTS By Mati Drop
Saturday, January 5th at 2:30 pm
France. ATLANTIQUES, 2009, 15 mins.; SNOW CANON, 2011, 33 mins.; BIG IN VIETNAM, 2012, 28 mins. Best known for her performance in Claire Denis' 35 SHOTS OF RUM, Mati Diop is steadily acquiring international recognition as a director of intimate and intense narrative portraits. Her three most recent shorts vary widely in subject-from a tragic voyage over the Moroccan border to a coming-of-age seduction in the Alps and a chance meeting between two Vietnamese expats in the streets of Marseilles-but they share brilliant experimental approaches to film structure and form.

SIBERIA (SIBÉRIE) With Joana Preiss in person Saturday, January 5th at 5 pm Presented with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States. France. Dir. Joana Preiss. 2011, 82 mins. With Preiss, Bruno Dumont. Filmed entirely by Preiss and her then lover, Dumont, mostly in the claustrophobia of a train car on the Trans-Siberian Railway, SIBERIA is an intense and raw observation of a relationship's denouement. With unflinching honesty and a Direct Cinema approach, Preiss's documentary is a fascinating psychological exploration of love, dependency, and the bounds of romantic privacy.

ARRAIANOS
With Eloy Enciso in person
Saturday, January 5th at 7:30 pm
Hosted by Maria and Raphael Gonzalez.
Co-presented and supported by Pragda. Additional support provided by Spain Culture New York-Consulate General of Spain: member of the network Spain Arts & Culture.
Spain. Dir. Eloy Enciso. 2012, 70 mins. Somewhere between documentary and fable, ARRAIANOS is an unconventional portrait of an old village on the Galicia-Portugal border, where the inhabitants live and work in a quiet routine. Alternating with real moments of daily village life-with scenes of farming, drinking in the local bar, and singing traditional songs-are dramatizations from a foreboding play by the Galician writer Jenaro Marinhas del Valle, and swirling rumors that a new, unwelcome world may be pressing its way through the immense surrounding forest...

Preceded by BIRDS (ZWAZO). Portugal. Dir. Gabriel Abrantes. 2012, 17 mins. Three Haitian girls make their way through the vegetation and colonial ruins of Jakmel, arriving at the town square to find a local production of Aristophanes' BIRDS.

INORI
SUNDAY, JANUARY 6, 2:30 P.M.
Japan. Dir. Pedro González-Rubio. 2012, 72 mins. Winner of the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, INORI is the haunting, poetic, and atmospheric second feature from González-Rubio (Alamar). In collaboration with Japanese filmmaker Naomi Kawase, González-Rubio explores a tiny mountain community in Japan made up entirely of the elderly. While the younger generations have left for bigger cities, the scattered few remaining inhabitants perform their everyday activities in peaceful and reflective solitude.

EASY RIDER
With James Benning in person
Sunday, January 6th at 5 pm
U.S. Dir. James Benning. 2012, 95 mins. Revitalized by his recent switch to digital filmmaking, Benning, one of the greats of American experimental cinema, "remakes" Dennis Hopper's 1969 classic by taking a road trip through the film's locations. Featuring Benning's extraordinary eye for composition, snatches of dialogue from the original film, and an all-female soundtrack, the result engages the viewer's memory of EASY RIDER in surprising and provocative ways, questioning the mythology of the American landscape and the 1960s counterculture.

XAVIER
Sunday, January 6th at 7:30 pm
Portugal. Dir. Manuel Mozos. 1991/2002, 100 mins. With Pedro Hestnes, Cristina Carvalhal, José Meireles. The troubled title character of Xavier (Hestnes, star of Pedro Costa's O Sangue) returns to Lisbon after a military stint, determined to lead a meaningful life, only to find his world closing in on him. This almost lost classic of recent Portuguese cinema was shot in 1991 but only completed in 2002, and has barely been seen outside Portugal since. Deadpan and dreamy, it's a work of bone-deep melancholy, a young man's film that bears the scars of age.

Preceded by NOELIA. Argentina. Dir. María Alché. 2012, 14 mins. Seemingly abandoned, a young woman walks through the porous city with her camera, finding potential mothers at every turn.

GREATEST HITS
With Nicolás Pereda in person
Friday, January 11th at 7:30 pm
Presented in collaboration with Cinema Tropical.
Mexico. Dir. Nicolás Pereda. 2012, 103 mins. With Gabino Rodríguez, Teresa Sánchez, José Rodríguez López, Luis Rodríguez. A restless formalist and one of the most inventive practitioners of the hybrid film, the prolific Pereda casts two of his regular collaborators, Gabino Rodríguez and Sánchez, as son and mother in a domestic drama about a returning prodigal father. But the reality of the film soon starts to slip. An actor is replaced; scenes are repeated with slight variations; worlds collide as actors interact with fictional characters. Both playful and radical, GREATEST HITS is one of Pereda's most emotionally resonant films, and also, as the title suggests, a culminating work.

WINTER, GO AWAY!
Saturday, January 12th at 2 pm
Russia. Dirs. Graduates of Marina Razbezhkina's School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre. 2012, 79 mins. A collaboration among ten young directors, all students of the documentarian Razbezhkina, this street-level chronicle of last winter's demonstrations against Vladimir Putin's presidential run captures the carnivalesque energy of the protests and the brutality of the crackdowns. As befits a collective work, it's a vivid portrait of the many faces of contemporary Russia-some (like the Pussy Riot episode) familiar from the headlines, others not at all.

RECONVERSION (RECONVERSÃO)
With Thom Andersen in person
Saturday, January 12th at 4 pm
Portugal. Dir. Thom Andersen. 2012, 68 mins. A master of the essay film, Andersen (Los Angeles Plays Itself) turns his attention to the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura. Considering built, unrealized, and abandoned projects and using a stop-motion technique that emphasizes the temporal dimension of architecture, RECONVERSION regards buildings not as static objects but living things, subject to decay, death, and even rebirth.

Revision
SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 6:00 P.M*
Germany. Dir. Philip Scheffner. 2012, 106 mins. In 1992, two Romanian men were shot dead in a field near the German-Polish border. According to official reports, they were victims of a hunting accident-mistaken by a pair of German hunters for wild boar. Twenty years later, filmmaker Scheffner carries out the painstaking investigation that never took place back then, seeking out witnesses, investigators, the police, and the dead men's relatives, in an attempt to reassess the case through the lenses of history, regret, and remorse. His cinematic revision of the case leads to profoundly unsettling revelations about immigration and justice in Europe today. *Please note corrected date.

P-047
Saturday, January 12th at 8:30 pm
Thailand. Dir. Kongdej Jaturanrasamee. 2011, 98 mins. With Apichai Tragoolpadetgrai, Prinya Ngamwongwarn. Lek (Apichai) and Kong (Prinya) work beside each other at the local mall, and spend their free time breaking into neighborhood homes together. Once inside, they don't steal anything; instead, they gather ideas for possible alternate lives. After one of these exploits, Lek wakes up in a hospital, whereupon everyone insists on calling him "Kong." Starting off as a conventional portrait of directionless young adulthood, this breakout independent film from veteran Thai director Kongdej soon transitions into a complex and elliptical meditation on the fluidity of identity.

Preceded by COULD SEE A PUMA. Argentina. Dir. Eduardo Williams. 2012, 17 mins. A group of young men journey from their destroyed neighborhood to the deepest reaches of the earth in this gorgeous apocalyptic fantasy.

IN The Shadows
Sunday, January 13th at 2:30 pm
Germany. Dir. Thomas Arslan. 2010, 85 mins. With Misel Maticevic, Rainer Bock, Uwe Bohm. One of the pioneering figures in the loose movement known as the Berlin School, Arslan finds fresh subtleties in the familiar contours of the heist thriller. In this modern-day La Samouraï, a laconic master thief (a superb Maticevic), just out of jail, plans another job, with a crooked cop and a former boss in pursuit. The premise is familiar, but the pleasures of this exemplary genre movie, shot in crisp, gleaming digital, lie in the hypnotic clarity and precision of Arslan's filmmaking.

SLEEPLESS NIGHT
Sunday, January 13th at 5 pm
Presented in collaboration with the Korea Society.
South Korea. Dir. Jang Kun-jae. 2012, 65 mins. With Kim Soo-hyun, Kim Joo-ryeong. The winner of both the Audience and Best Korean Film prizes at the Jeonju International Film Festival, this second feature from young director Jang (Eighteen) is an intimate portrait of a working-middle-class married couple in their early thirties struggling through daily trials and facing the decision of whether to start a family. Finely directed with deceptively simple performances, this short feature is an intense pleasure to experience.

Preceded by AS THE FLAMES ROSE. Portugal. Dir. João Rui Guerra da Mata. 2012, 26 mins. With João Pedro Rodrigues. On the phone in his dark bedroom, a man relives the end of a turbulent affair, while across town, the city burns.

SHORTS by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Sunday, January 13th at 7:30 pm
Brazil. Dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho. 2002-09, 91 mins. total. Mendonça's debut feature, NEIGHBORING SOUNDS, a revelatory portrait of class tensions in Recife, was one of 2012's best-reviewed films. This program of his acclaimed shorts traces the artistic evolution of this former critic and programmer and demonstrates his versatility. The films here span a wide range of genres, reworking and combining the conventions of horror, romance, and science fiction to startling effect. Featuring The Little Cotton Girl (2002, 6 mins.), Green Vinyl (2004, 16 mins.), Friday Night Saturday Morning (2005, 16 mins.), Electrodomestica (2005, 22 mins.) Luz Industrial Magicá (2008, 7 mins), and Cold Tropics (Recife Frio) (2009, 24 mins).

Museum of the Moving Image (movingimage.us) advances the understanding, enjoyment, and appreciation of the art, history, technique, and technology of film, television, and digital media. In January 2011, the Museum reopened after a major expansion and renovation that nearly doubled its size. Accessible, innovative, and forward-looking, the Museum presents exhibitions, education programs, significant moving-image works, and interpretive programs, and maintains a collection of moving-image related artifacts.

Hours: Tuesday-Thursday, 10:30 am to 5:00 pm Friday, 10:30 to 8:00 pm. Saturday-Sunday, 11:30 am to 7:00 pm. Closed Monday except for holiday openings. Holiday hours: The Museum will be Monday, December 31, and on New Year's Day (January 1) from 10:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. The Museum will be closed on Thanksgiving (November 22) and Christmas (December 25).
Film Screenings: Friday evenings, Saturdays and Sundays, and as scheduled. Unless otherwise noted, screenings are included with Museum admission.

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