Capital Projections: Great escape edition
This week’s openings include a political drama set in 1970s East Germany and a documentary about one of the defining American rock groups of that decade. The Capital Irish Film Festival offers a documentary of The Troubles, and repertory screenings include a masterpiece of world cinema from Armenia and a classic horror movie from one of the genre’s great showmen.
Capital Projections is The DC Line’s selective and subjective guide to notable movie screenings in the coming week.
BALLOON
A patchwork hot air balloon is an apt metaphor for the process of making a feature film. Much as pieces of fabric of various sizes and colors can be stitched together to make a usable aircraft, various motion picture artists and technicians — from actors to editors and beyond — need to achieve a level of chemistry and cooperation in order for their finished product to come alive. Thanks to a finely tuned cast and crew, director Michael Bully Herbig reaches such heights with Balloon. Based on the story of two East German families who in 1979 came up with what they hoped would be a furtive way to cross the border, this political thriller takes flight even when its protagonists are anxiously grounded.
The film sets up the fraught tone of the era with a potent if somewhat heavy-handed juxtaposition: A school graduation where students are gathered in praise of socialism is intercut with a nighttime dash for freedom as a man tries to cross from the GDR into West Germany; he falls short and is shot. Meanwhile, back home from his son’s commencement, Peter Strelzyk (Friedrich Mücke) and his family are making small talk with a neighbor who works for State Security — the repressive and efficient force known as the Stasi. When Peter, his wife and kids catch sight of a cluster of balloons sailing to the north, they know that the winds are favorable for their own journey.
You see, the Strelzkys, along with their friend Günter Wetzel (David Kross, recently seen as a Nazi officer-turned-football goalie in The Keeper) have secretly assembled a hot air balloon in order to whisk their families away, out of shooting distance of Stasi agents and into the safety of the West. Balloon follows the desperate families in a race against time with their plans sputtering and an eager Stasi agent (Thomas Kretschmann) hot on their trail.
Herbig weaves the Cold War plot together with the help of a strong cast, but the most valuable player might be the cinematic equivalent of the diligent needleworkers who sewed miles of fabric into a vehicle big enough to carry eight passengers. Editor Alexander Dittner keeps the threads moving for just over two hours with a terrific visual energy that conveys the anxiety of the would-be escape artists and the brutal diligence of their pursuers. Balloon is a finely crafted vessel that captures the paranoia and excitement of its time.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 28, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
ONCE WERE BROTHERS: ROBBIE ROBERTSON AND THE BAND
Daniel Roher’s largely compelling profile of rock group The Band and co-founder Robbie Robertson is about more than the music. Focusing on the life of the primary songwriter, Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band follows the excitement and discovery of rock ‘n’ roll through its early years in the 1950s to the forward-looking 1960s. But, much like The Band lost some steam near the end of its existence, the film fizzles in its final act.
Once Were Brothers begins with Robertson in the studio today, recording a tribute to his former bandmates. Before he tells the group’s story, he tells his own: Born in Toronto in 1943, Robertson had an early affinity for music. He was given a guitar when he was a boy, and his teenage years happened to coincide with a seismic cultural shift: the early years of rock ‘n’ roll. By the time Robertson was 15 years old, he was writing songs.
Future members of The Band came together playing for rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins, who called his backup players The Hawks. In 1965, they moved up to a higher-profile gig with Bob Dylan, who had cultivated a devoted folk music fan base. But when audiences first heard the electric rock he made with his new band (“Play it loud!” Dylan famously instructed them), the audience booed, and Robertson was flummoxed that the music he had come to love could inspire such hatred.
If the volatile ’60s were getting musically louder, The Band’s 1968 debut went in the other direction, its synthesis of rock and traditional music going against the counterculture mood. The dichotomy carried through beyond the sound: Most rock bands of the time would thumb their nose at their parents; members of The Band gathered their extended family members for a group portrait that appeared on the album cover. Roher underlines such kinship when he cues the group’s signature hit “The Weight” to photos of Robertson’s first child, Much as The Band gave birth to a new kind of music — which today would be called Americana — Robertson was working on his personal legacy as well.
Himself an only child, Robertson thought of his bandmates as his brothers. Unfortunately, drugs and an increasing recklessness began to break them apart; Roher doesn’t address the fact that the music suffered as well. By 1976 The Band was playing its farewell concert, documented by director Martin Scorsese in The Last Waltz, and generous footage from that film is used to tell the end of The Band’s story here. But that all-star send-off, which featured guest musicians such as Joni Mitchell and Van Morrison, was a hard act for Roher — and Robertson — to follow. Robertson has never stopped making music, but the 2019 song that gives the movie its title has none of the spark that drove his best-known work. In its last moments, Once Were Brothers feels unresolved, finally drifting apart much like its subjects did.
Watch the trailer.
Opens Friday, Feb. 28, at Landmark E Street Cinema. $12.50.
SHOOTING THE DARKNESS
Directed by Tom Burke and made for Irish television, this powerful documentary focuses on a handful of intrepid photographers who covered The Troubles, the decades-long conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions in Northern Ireland. In less than an hour, Burke and his subjects pack a world of historical information and fraught emotion — and even though the stories are specific to a time and place, they make for a fascinating tale of media savvy that’s relevant today.
Stanley Matchett of the Belfast Telegraph began his career documenting the arrival of the Beatles in Ireland; not long after that, hired by a local musician, he made a colorful and almost dreamlike album cover that featured a young woman holding a pair of lambs in a field. Matchett’s most famous photo, however, was a black-and-white image of stark reality. Covering the 1972 incident known as Bloody Sunday, during which British soldiers shot 26 unarmed protesters in Derry, Northern Ireland, Matchett photographed the Rev. Edward Daly waving a blood-stained white handkerchief as he accompanied a dying victim being carried out of harm’s way.
The photographers highlighted in the documentary knew their images could be used for political purposes, and the Irish Republican Army was known for being particularly calculating in front of the camera, its prominent members making defiant poses during coverage of funeral processions. Such posturing reflected a brutal and highly divisive climate. Hugh Russell, a boxer-turned-photographer, captured images that showed the casualties of hate, like the body of a man who was shot as he was washing his car — a victim singled out because he was Catholic.
The film becomes more intense as the violence escalates and journalists talk about the “collect,” when they would visit a victim’s family to acquire a photo of the deceased for publication. The photos collected after one especially gruesome pub shooting in Loughinisland in 1994 — an octogenarian was among the victims — may have turned the tide and contributed to the peace process. Shooting the Darkness only scratches the surface of a volatile era, yet each photograph it shows tells the audience volumes. The film is being screened at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center as part of the 14th annual Capital Irish Film Festival, which runs through March 1.
Watch the trailer.
Sunday, March 1, at 5 p.m. at the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center. $13.
THE COLOR OF POMEGRANATES
This weekend the National Gallery of Art, in conjunction with the Freer Gallery of Art and other cultural institutions, launches the series An Armenian Odyssey, part of a citywide celebration of Armenian music, art and history. And there’s no better way to launch the film portion of the festival than with this masterpiece of world cinema.
Director Sergei Parajanov’s 1969 film was inspired by the life of 18th-century Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. Yet The Color of Pomegranates is not a conventional biopic — in fact, there’s nothing else quite like it in all of cinema. Parajanov tells the story of Sayat-Nova through sequences that incorporate historical tableaux, intensely colorful compositions and religious rituals. Loosely depicting the poet’s life from childhood to adulthood, Sayat-Nova is portrayed by several different actors, including the director’s muse, Sofiko Chiaureli, who plays six roles, both male and female. Images of sacrificial animals and a cluster of thorns come from the Eastern Orthodox Church, and while some of the symbolism may be familiar to Christians in the West, much of the meaning remains mysterious. But this radical filmmaking is so sumptuous that it carries the uncomprehending viewer along on a mystical ride, dominated by a blood-red hue that’s as gorgeous as it is meaningful.
Although largely abstract, The Color of Pomegranates also tells a story of persecution and the destruction of ancient traditions. When the film — which Parajanov originally called Sayat-Nova — was first released in the former USSR, Soviet censors and the Communist Party ordered that much of the religious imagery be removed. The film has since been restored to a state that comes close to the director’s vision. The film will be screened along with Parajanov’s 1966 short “Kiev Frescoes.”
Watch the trailer.
Saturday, Feb. 29, at 1 p.m. at the Freer Gallery of Art. Free.
13 GHOSTS
While The Color of Pomegranates employs vivid reds in an avant-garde display of religious symbolism, director William Castle begins his 1960 horror movie with his own abstract splashes of color. The master showman, however, is just using them to frighten you.
Still, this classic haunted-house movie has more on its mind than jump-scares. We meet Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) giving a lecture to visitors at the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, dedicated to the Los Angeles site in which the remains of trapped Ice Age animals have been preserved in primordial goo. With a wife and two kids, Zorba has his own struggle: He cannot afford to support his family. Much to the chagrin of his wife Hilda (Rosemary DeCamp), he can’t keep up with payments on their furniture, so it gets repossessed. But after his son Buck (Charles Herbert) makes a birthday wish for a house filled with free furniture, the Zorbas learn of an unexpected windfall: A rich uncle has died, and he has left a huge and fully furnished Victorian mansion to Cyrus and his family. The catch? It’s haunted.
By definition, all ghost stories deal in death and mortality, but the museum setting that opens the film has an especially gloomy resonance: Is human effort ultimately futile, much like the cries of animals caught in tar thousands of years ago? This screening is a presentation of the Washington Psychotronic Film Society, so beer and barbecue will be on hand to briefly cast away intimations of doom.
Watch the trailer.
Monday, March 2, at 8 p.m. at Smoke and Barrel. Free.
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