What's Happening

Until June 15, 2008

The Little Dog Laughed

Portland, OR

Playwright Douglas Carter Beane knows a little bit about the weirdness of Hollywood, having been the screenwriter of To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, the campy road movie that cast Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo as a trio of drag queens. Beane, who has spent most of his career in the theater, used his personal experiences of Tinseltown's bizarre practices when he penned The Little Dog Laughed, his Tony nominated satire on Hollywood which is currently playing at Portland Center Stage. The plot revolves around Mitchell Greene, an up-and-coming actor who falls for hustler Alex, much to the consternation of his agent Diane, who is very keen to cover up his "slight recurring case of homosexuality" before the press or his female fanbase get wind of it. Redolent of the scathingly comic depictions of the film business in David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow and David Rabe's Hurly Burly — two other plays written by prominent playwrights writing from bitter experience — The Little Dog Laughed is a caustic examination of the price of fame, sex and love in Hollywood.

May 9 to June 29, 2008

Visualizing The Sacred: Islam On Film

Los Angeles, CA

In a recent interview, documentarian Nick Broomfield offered the opinion that for those who wanted to achieve peace in Iraq "the way forward" would be to "learn who some of the Iraqis are, what their culture is, how they see the world." This sentiment is very much echoed in the mission statement of the UCLA Film and Television Archive's Visualizing The Sacred: Islam On Film season which, in the wake of post-9/11 fixations on Islamic fundamentalism and its links to terrorism, here aims to "explore the deeply human joys and complexities of Muslim faith and identity as viewed from a diverse range of cultural contexts and genres." The films selected are impressively diverse and range from Moustapha Akkad's 1976 The Message, a 3-hour epic on the origins of Islam starring Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas, to iconic Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's attack on religious extremism Destiny (Al-Massir), and Muhammad: The Last Prophet, an animated feature from Richard Rich, most famous for directing Disney's The Fox and the Hound. Two thematically linked forthcoming releases, Fatih Akin's festival smash The Edge of Heaven and Sarah Gavron's Brick Lane, also play in tandem with the season.

May 9 to June 26, 2008

European 60s

Omaha, NE

Looking back over the history of cinema, it's difficult to think of a group of individuals who had a greater impact on the way we now think about film than the European directors of the 1960s. New Waves sprung up in France and Czechoslovakia, in Britain there were the Angry Young Men and in Italy the post-Neorealists, where elsewhere filmmakers like Andrej Wajda and Ingmar Bergman were continuing to make an impact. Film Streams' series European 60s collects together a mouthwatering selection of films that were stylistically innovative and bold in their subject matter. Proceedings begin with the one-two punch of Godard's Breathless and Truffaut's 400 Blows, and then continue with Fellini's La Dolce Vita, Powell's Peeping Tom, Antonioni's Blow-Up, Forman's Loves of a Blonde and fully a dozen more gems over the course of the next month or so. In addition to seminal classics of the era, there are also some interesting leftfield choices in the line-up such as Jacques Tati's Playtime, and Richard Lester's first outing with the Beatles, A Hard Day's Night.

May 10, 2008

Pangea Day

Everywhere

In 2004, Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim brought her documentary about the start-up Arab television news channel Al Jazeera, Control Room, to the Sundance Film Festival. The film generated debate, support, criticism and convinced Noujaim of the power of film to bring people together in discussion and passion. Two years later, Noujaim was awarded the prestigious TED award, one of three distributed each year to a nominated visionary. Each winner is given $100,000 and the chance to have a wish granted. Noujaim wanted to bring the world together through film, and from that wish, Pangea Day was born. The project kicked off in June 2007 by soliciting filmmakers from around the world to submit films on the subject of understand the other. A panel of filmmakers and artists narrowed the list down from 2,500 films from 103 countries to ten short films. These ten films, about four-hours in total, will be transmitted through televisions and over the web on March 10 from six large, hosted events in Los Angeles, Rio De Janeiro, London, Kigali, Cairo and Mumbai. To find out if there is a local screening event near you, go to the Pangea interactive map.

May 9 to 17, 2008

The Santa Cruz Film Festival

Santa Cruz, CA

Santa Cruz, the laidback hippie beach town south of San Francisco, rolls out the red carpet for the 7th Santa Cruz Film Festival. For nine days, people who could otherwise hang out at the beach, choose to walk into dark rooms to watch movies. And for good reason. Under the thematic rubric "The Big Picture," the festival turns their attention to documentaries, presenting a solid survey of original and independent work. Founder and Executive Director Jane Sullivan stresses the inherent suspense of the everyday in these films: "In an election year, in art, in film, the way things morph on a daily basis is as exciting as it is destabilizing." The opening night film stays local with Curt Worden's One Fast Move or I'm Gone: Kerouac's Big Sur, a cinematic appreciation of the beat novelist's last novel. In addition to several films made by students from the nearby University of California, Santa Cruz, the festival also programed a series of short films made by local high school pupils. And the festival ends with another local's film, Jeff Warrick's Programming the Nation?, a documentary about the complex messages being delivered through our media. The underlying message of this festival is one of community, an concept explored in more than one panel or film this year.