LAFF 2009: AUTUMN

Autumn Sonata Revolution.

After the revolution betrayed

By Ed Rampell

Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1964 film, Before the Revolution, was full of yearning for socialism. One would think that the collapse of Soviet-style socialism and the suppression of the 1989 Tienanmen Square protests in China would be fertile ground for filmmakers. In Mercedes Stalenhoef’s documentary Carmen Meets Borat, which was also screened at this year’s LAFF, the Romanian village’s capitalist -- of all people -- remarks in passing that the people were better off under communism. This, of course, is a great subject for a film, but few movies (at least those released in the West) have dealt with how the defeat of socialistic governments since the late 1980s have affected the masses of the Warsaw Pact nations, as well as socialists around the world. How do the true believers continue to live after their revolutionary god has failed them? How do they adjust to such cataclysmic change?

There have been notable exceptions to the neglect of this subject matter, such as the German films Go Trabi Go by Peter Timm and its 1992 sequel, plus Good Bye, Lenin, Wolfgang Becker’s witty 2003 satire. Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s The Lives of Others, about the so-called German Democratic Republic’s secret police spying on artists, won 2007’s Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Another German drama, Jan Schutte’s The Farewell – about Bertolt Brecht’s final days – had a similar theme; although the playwright died in 1958, The Farewell’s subject matter had contemporary relevance when it was released in 2000.

Now, a new Turkish film screened at LAFF joins the ranks of movie meditations on Marxism’s defeats in the past 20 years.

Writer-director Ozcan Alper’s somber Autumn is about Yusuf (sensitively played by Yusuf Onur Saylak), a political prisoner who, due to failing health, is finally released from prison after serving 10 years for his activism as a student radical. He returns home to his remote mountain village and aged mother. The world has moved on since his incarceration; his old comrades, such as his former girlfriend, have married and started families. The fall of the Berlin Wall (which had actually fallen before Yusuf’s imprisonment) has opened up travel opportunities for citizens of the former USSR, and now fallen women from what had been Soviet Georgia come to Turkey to ply their trade as the ultimate capitalists: prostitutes. Yusuf, who has been weakened by his decade-long incarceration, begins an affair with the beautiful if mournful hooker Eka (Megi Kobladaze), who has a penchant for Russian novels.

At one point, the woman who had experienced Moscow-type communism, incredulously comments on Yusuf having actually spent 10 years behind bars for socialism. Yusuf has no response, not even a tepid political slogan.

Nevertheless, despite political differences, the two characters, who are both damaged goods, are drawn to each other. Will these lovers be able to save one another?

Autumn includes Feza Caldiran’s cinematography of some beautiful scenery. There are also what appears to be archival footage of Turkish dissenters demonstrating and fighting against the police and government, scenes that represent the 30-something Yusuf’s activist, engaged youth.

At the Black Sea where they meet, Yusuf and Eka separately and together stand on a pier that juts out into the ocean like some of our SoCal piers, amidst rising swelling waves crashing about them, perhaps reminiscent of the 1925 Soviet revolutionary classic by Sergei Eisenstein, Battleship Potemkin. But now, the revolution is at low tide. Socialism has been dealt setbacks from the Blue Danube to the Pacific Ocean; indeed, since the end of the Mikhail Gorbachev era, the only place where socialism has arguably prospered is in Latin America and the Caribbean. Tellingly, Yusuf’s sole remaining friend at his mountainous Turkish village is named Mikhail, who, as portrayed by Serkan Keskin, has also tried to move on with his life but bitterly complains that now, even the dream of socialism has been taken away. Autumn ends with a long shot of a mountainous funeral procession bearing a red cloth draped coffin – perhaps symbolizing the death of the socialist dream of a workers paradise.

Autumn is an elegiac, poetic movie and one of the most moving moving pictures presented at 2009’s L.A. Film Festival. This thoughtful film deserves to be picked up by an American distributor so U.S. audiences can experience this beautiful Turkish work of art. Considering Autumn is Alper’s feature debut and that he is an auteur approximately only the same age as his lead character, this Turkish writer-director has a bright cinematic future ahead of him. Hopefully, so do political ideals of a just world.









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LAFF 2009: (500) DAYS OF SUMMER

Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel create some heat in (500 Days of Summer).


A stylish witty romantic romp.

By Ed Rampell

This year LAFF’s offerings ran the motion picture gamut. Like Charlyne Yi’s Paper Heart, director Marc Webb's (500) Days of Summer is a lighthearted rumination on romance and love with serious undertones, told with great wit and panache. On the other hand, as non-cincematic as James Lee’s Call If You Need Me is, Webb’s romantic comedy is slyly, stylishly cinematic and is creatively told out of chronological order.

Webb's inventive movie has montages of close ups of parts of Summer’s (played by the zany Zooey Deschanel) body that are reminiscent of a 1960s Jean-Luc Godard film. Indeed, in a fantasy sequence Webb and screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber wittily pay tribute to France’s New Wave, as well as to Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 classic, The Seventh Seal (although, oddly enough, the characters speak French, not Swedish). There are also droll references to the 1967 film, The Graduate..

It’s often said that in relationships one partner loves the other more, and (500) Days of Summer, which is the story of Summer’s affair with office mate and greeting card writer Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), epitomizes this unequal phenomenon. Sometimes he (or she, as the case may be) really justisn’t that into you. Deschanel -- who was so serious and vulnerable as a slighted daughter in Winter Passing (2005) -- proves herself to have quite an adept comic touch in here. Gordon-Levitt has just the right mixture of whimsy and angst as he romances the distant Summer, who has been scarred by her parents’ divorce. The supporting ensemble, including the obligatory male bonding buddies, adds to the movie’s merry musings about the meaning of love and life.

Unlike certain blabbermouth reviewers, I really don’t want to give away more of the plot to you, Dear Reader. Suffice it to say that this was probably one ofLAFF ’s most enjoyable and popular pictures (the screening I saw was completely sold out with a line outside the splendid Majestic Crest Theatre, with its lovelyblack-light mural of L.A.). Speaking of the cityscape, this film has some great cinematography of Los Angeles that calls to mind Gordon Willis’ camera work in Woody Allen’s 1979 ode to New York, Manhattan. And keep an eye out for an expressive, ebullient laugh out loud daydream sequence involving, among other things, UCLA’s marching band.

In addition to exploring the highs and lows of that little thing called love, (500) Days of Summer also touches upon the theme of getting out of a rut and reclaiming one’s creative mojo. This is the rarest of things: a (late) summer movie minus explosions that’s an ideal date flick and also provides food for thought. How do I love thee? Let me screen the ways.

LAFF 2009: PAPER HEART

Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera offer write on comedy in Paper Heart.


Yi gads! To kill a mockumentary with wit and style

By Ed Rampell

Actress/comedian/co-writer Charlyne Yi asks the big questions about love in a lighthearted way in Paper Heart. This is, I suppose, a mockumentary about the nerdy, gawky 20-something Yi not only searching for romance, but trying to find out if she is lovable and capable of giving love, and if love even exists. Paper Heart is also a road trip that extends from La-La-Land’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams to Las Vegas’ chintzy chapels for faux Elvis weddings to Paris, the City of L’Amour (and I don’t mean Louie). Along the way there are plenty of laughs, and also some poignant moments mixed in with the drollery as Yi searches for elusive love.

After Yi starts dating Michael Cera, who plays his apparently awkward self (a good counterpart if not foil to Yi), the co-star of 2007’s Juno and Superbad begins to chafe at being tailed by pseudo-documentarian Nicholas Jasenovec (the name of the film’s actual director, who is portrayed by actor Jake Johnson) and the filmmakers’ constant invasions of privacy. As such, in addition to offering wit and wisdom about the nature of love, Paper Heart also has something to say about our media saturated society and unreal “reality” TV obsessions. (Wouldn’t it be funny if, in real life, the eponymous Nanook of the North and Moana of the South Seas really hated documentarian Robert Flaherty, for being a butt-in-sky and constantly shoving cameras into their faces at their igloos or huts?)

Keep your peepers peeled for cameos by actors such as Seth Rogen. Also adding to the merriment is what may be a droll aside about low budge indie filmmaking, as various scenes, such as a motorcycle crash, are reenacted in charmingly cheap but visually inventive ways. With her self-deprecating humor based on her insecurities and quest for companionship, the beguiling, bespectacled Yi emerges as a sort of female Asian Woody Allen-esque character (and I don’t mean Soon Yi).

Paper Heart was one of LAFF’s wittiest and best offerings this year; if you missed it during the film festival, don’t miss it when this marvelous mockumentary is released. And as for cutie pie Yi questioning of her ability to love and be loved: Yi of little faith!

LAFF 2009: CONVENTION

It is the real thing at A.J. Schnack's Convention.

An unconventional look at democracy

By Ed Rampell

The best thing about A.J. Schnack’s entertaining, engaging new documentary about the 2008 Democratic Party National Convention is how the director skillfully counterpoints several diverse groups with different issues converging on a single place: Denver’s Pepsi Center.

Depicted in Convention are, first and foremost, the protesters, including aging ex-SDS-ers, members of “Recreate 68” (R68), assorted young anarchists, and anti-war Iraq/Afghanistan veterans.

Then there are Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper and city officials, including security forces, who must not only host the Democrats’ shindig, but somehow keep the peace as they accommodate and, at the same time, contain demonstrators. They, of course, have the power to disrupt the proceedings, like what famously happened during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago (aka “Czech-ago”).

Finally, there is the press corps covering the coronation of Barack Obama, mostly embodied by Denver Post staffers.

It is the genius of this clever documentary to focus on these three disparate groups, instead of on the Democratic honchos (whom we’ve certainly gotten a belly full of already), although Senator Hillary Clinton, Vice Presidential candidate Joe Biden and Obama are, of course, glimpsed from time to time and occasionally take center stage.

Various characters in this nonfiction film helmed by Schnack -- who previously directed 2006’s Kurt Cobain About A Son -- enter stage left. Barbara and Mark Cohen are longtime activists who met at the University of Denver where, in the sizzling sixties, organized against the Vietnam War with Students for a Democratic Society. Now these two 68-year-old co-founders of Recreate 68 are back, continuing the good fight against America’s endless wars du jour.

The Denver Post journalists include Allsion Sherry, a sort of cub reporter who is thrust from the education beat into the paper’s political team in order to help the overstretched daily cover the unfolding spectacle. We follow the sometimes hotheaded young redhead as she dishes on the Dems online and in the Post’s print edition.

Hickenlooper’s loopy team includes the mayor himself, a bureaucrat who learns how to ride a scooter in order to beat the convention traffic, and other various planners and assistants, such as Denver’s Permit and Protest Liaison. Kevin Scott sports D’Artagnan-like hair beneath his lower lip, as he tries to run interference between the protest marchers, police, officials and conventioneers. While the City administration tries to present a kinder and gentler face -- look closely as Big Brother follows from afar the demonstrators step by step -- street by street, on the command center’s Orwellian big screens, as they surveill the mostly law abiding, peaceable protesters.

At times the demonstrators appear to be buffoonish -- at one point a Denver Post newsie derides them as the worst protesters he’s ever seen. At times, while confronting the heat in the heat of the moment, there’s dissent among the dissenters as they argue amongst themselves. After a tense standoff, the crafty Obama appears to co-opt and outwit them so pro-peace Iraq/Afghanistan veterans won’t steal his thunder. But as they avoid the so-called “free speech cages” set-up to ensnare them far from the convention center -- out of sight of Democratic delegates and the media limelight -- just as the city administrators continue the electoral process and Denver Post reporters perpetuate the 1st Amendment, the activists continue America’s grand progressive tradition. It began with the Boston Tea Party and Lexington and Concord, continuing with John Brown, Fredrick Douglass and the abolitionists, Tecumseh, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, Susan B. Anthony and later the Suffragettes and feminists, the founding of May Day at Chicago after the Haymarket Square riot as workers fought for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, with the CIO and other unions, the Wobblies, Socialists and Communists, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and other Civil Rights and Black power advocates, the Chicago 7 (or was it 8?) and other anti-war dissidents, and on to those brave, impetuous militants in Denver’s streets, heirs and heiresses to America’s revolutionary heritage.

I have one bone to pick with Convention. Sometimes the soundtrack was quite irritating. Marching bands are to music what the Bush regime was to presidencies. Nevertheless, Convention reminded me of Medium Cool, Haskell Wexler’s radical 1969 classic set and partially shot in the thick of 1968’s Chicago convention, mingling fiction with newsreel footage as teargas and the police riot unfolded. In retrospect, all Daley and the Dems had to do was to give the students permits to sleep in the park, and all of that infamous billysticking bloodshed and brutality could have easily been avoided. It was a repeat of this traumatizing scene that Hickenlooper’s interlopers and the Democratic spinners wished to repeat.

In Convention we get to follow and see City administrators, student agitators, newspaper reporters and national politicians interact and vie with one another. That’s something called “democracy,” and this film critic from the great state of mind casts his ballot in favor of A.J. Schnack’s Convention.

LAFF 2009:: I SELL THE DEAD

Dead-off funny. A scene from I Sell the Dead.

Unfunny funny business among grave robbers

By Ed Rampell

Director-writer Glenn McQuaid’s I Sell the Dead is dead in the water. It is an unsuccessful attempt to mix the horror and comedy genres like screenwriters Bobby Lees and Fred Rinaldi so wittily did in 1940s Abbott and Costello movies, or Roman Polanski did in the1967 spoof, The Fearless Vampire Killers.

Dominic Monaghan and Larry Fessenden play bumbling body snatchers in this clunker set in 19th (or was it 18th?) century Britain. Ron “Hellboy” Perlman plays Father Duffy, who listens to the confession of one of the condemned grave robbers shortly before he’s scheduled to meet his maker, which provides the narrative structure for this motion picture mishap.

This movie mélange is neither particularly scary nor funny, so it won’t satisfy aficionados of either genre. It has mediocre special effects but some decent images that go from live action to an animation-like freeze frame. The flick is, at best, mildly amusing – and that’s not really quite good enough. Hopefully, I Sell the Dead won’t join the ranks of the undead and spawn a series of sequels that will sell tickets to popcorn munching munchkins for years to come at multiplexes.

LAFF 2009: CALL IF YOU NEED ME

The steady crime flow of James Lee's Call If You Need Me.

A penetrating, if uncinematic, look at Malaysia’s criminal underworld

By Ed Rampell

While I was watching veteran Malaysian director-writer James Lee’s crime drama Call If You Need Me I had to restrain myself from yelling at the screen: “Move the camera! After all, that’s why they call it ‘movies.’ And it’s okay to cut once in a while. Close ups are allowed, too!” Compared to another Southeast Asian underworld film, Oxide Pang Chun and Danny Pang’s 1999 kinetic Bangkok Dangerous, Lee’s film appeared as if it was lensed in slow motion and almost entirely in long shot. Seemingly devoid of film form, Call If You Need Me looked more like filmed theatre than a motion picture.

Nevertheless, I ended up finding this drama about uprooted villagers who move to the Malaysian capital of a grubby-looking Kuala Lumpur, where they pursue a life in crime, to be absorbing and strangely affecting. So I don’t know if Lee’s cinematic vernacular is really that limited or if the filmmaker deliberately made these directorial choices in order to allow his story to simply unfold, like real instead of reel life, before viewers’ eyes.

Call If You Need Me opens with country boy Or Kia (Sunny Pang) arriving at Kuala Lumpur, where he is taken under the wing of another ex-villager, Ah Soon (Pete Teo), who has become a leader of a smalltime gang of collectors. These K.L. hoods have a penchant for popping pills and screening porn. Tellingly, they have alienated love lives; Ah Soon is unable to bridge the gap between he and his girlfriend, Ah Peng (Thian See Chua), while Or Kia, who is rising through the gangster ranks like a sort of Malaysian Scarface, unenthusiastically consorts with hookers, while trying to stifle his student sister’s sexuality.

For the most part these low level low lifes’ idea of “packing heat” is grabbing hammers and sticks in order to do battle with rival criminals. Public Enemies this movie ain’t. It is, however, an understated, wistful look -- similar to another LAFF entry this year, the Mexican documentary, Rehje -- at displaced rural people turned topsy-turvy by big city life. This, of course, is an old theme in Western novels such as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, but under the guise of a mobster melodrama James Lee has updated this tale of the uprooted and loss of innocence to the 21st century realities of Malaysia. Sometimes, you really can’t go home again.

LAFF 2009: WAH DO DEM

What are they doing? A scene from Wah Do Dem.

Indie Irie

By Ed Rampell

Co-directors/co-writers Sam Fleischner and Ben Chace’s Wah Do Dem (What They Do) is a quirkily charming tale about a blonde Brooklyn screw-up named Max (Sean Bones) whose girlfriend (played by the musician Norah Jones) dumps him shortly before they are to depart on a cruise to Jamaica.

Unable to give her ticket away to friends, Max embarks on the anticipated Caribbean journey alone. The shrewd filmmakers with their minimalist equipment cleverly managed to shoot their low budge feature aboard an actual passenger ship during its voyage to the Caribbean.

After the cruise ship makes landfall at Jamaica Max is kind of marooned there, where this stranger in a strange island proceeds to have a series of picaresque misadventures. The fish out of water has the wah wahs and ha has as he encounters mystical musicians, low lifes, high Rastafarians, soccer players, sexy dancers and more as he tries to return to his “native” island of New York. In a sense, Wah Do Dem is a modern twist on Robinson Crusoe type of sagas about white Western beachcombers who have close encounters with Third World islanders. You know, the old “life among the ‘savages’” syndrome.

The indie’s action plays out against the portentous background of the actual election eve victory of presidential candidate Barack Obama, which seems to indicate some sort of cross-cultural meaning. Nevertheless, this is mostly a lighthearted feature and the protagonist never develops a close relationship with any of the Jamaicans he encounters, let alone a romance. Unlike other features shot there such as the first James Bond pic, 1962’s Dr. No, Wah Do Dem’s cinematography does not really reveal how stunningly beautiful Jamaica is. Max’s island experiences do not lead him toward a deeper, higher consciousness. To tell you the truth, Max is pretty lame and the actor who plays him – reggae musician Bones -- is funny but not especially attractive, although he does have a goofy appeal. Nonetheless, Wah Do Dem reminded me of my own wayward youth wandering around the South Seas Islands, and I enjoyed this good-natured and occasionally thoughtful amiable romp. A Jamaican woman in the audience commented that the film actually captured some of “the nuances” of Jamaica’s culture and character, and the filmmakers’ love of that unique isle shines through.

Wah Do Dem is nominated for the Los Angeles Film Festival’s $50,000 Narrative Competition prize. As one of its co-directors said that the feature’s entire budget was equal to one day of catering for the crew on another LAFF offering, Johnny Depp’s Public Enemies, if Wah Do Dem does win this award it will probably be bigger than the movie’s production and advertising budget.

THEATER REVIEW: SAINT JOAN OF THE SLAUGHTERHOUSES

Give them what they need. A scene from from Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses.

Slaughterdogma for dollars

By Ed Rampell

How can an artist possibly make financial disasters entertaining, and even laughable? Leave it to the 20th century’s top playwright, Bertolt Brecht to answer the questoin. Pacific Resident Theatre’s must see brilliant production of Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses is as timely today as it was in 1930, when Brecht first wrote this social satire shortly after the stock market crash launched the Great Depression.

The first one, that is, as Brecht’s parable about economic shenanigans and hooligans in Chicago’s meatpacking industry is even more applicable to our contemporary crises and fiscal fiascos triggered by greedy bankers, insurers, realtors and the whole global schmeer of capitalist pigs. Like the slaughterhouse machine that systematically slices and dices hogs, as rhapsodically described by Cridle (played by the seductive Robin Becker), with his barbed wit, Brecht exposes the inner workings of the unregulated free enterprise system, which is free to inflict misery on the masses in the pursuit of and in the name of the almighty buck.

Enter stage left into this class struggle religious crusaders known as the Warriors of God (the zealots’ acronym is a British pejorative for non-white Third Worlders) led by Joan Dark (a play on the French pronunciation of Joan of Arc). Joan tries to redeem the rabble, rebels and royalty of the stockyards through Christianity. Brecht’s titular character, who is superbly portrayed by Dalia Vosylius in a stellar performance, seems influenced by not only France’s Joan of Arc, but also by George Bernard Shaw’s Salvation Army leader Barbara Undershaft in his 1905 satire Major Barbara. (Sergeant Sarah Brown of the 1950 musical Guys and Dolls, which is currently being reprised on Broadway, can trace her theatrical provenance to Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses and Shaw’s Major Barbara.)

In addition to ruthlessly mocking and exposing the capitalist system, Brecht also critiques religion as the opiate of the masses – and the balm of the bourgeoisie – in Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses. The playwright reveals how the ruling class exploits faith to trick the workers, just as Thomas Frank does in his 2004 book. What’s the Matter With Kansas? God is cynically used to take the people’s eyes off of the class warfare ball by filling their heads with pie in the sky illusions and delusions. During the course of the play our gal Joan undergoes an inner struggle as she comes to an awareness of this, and how she has been used by stockyards robber baron Pierpont Mauler (played by a dapper Andrew Parks).

Along the route of Brecht’s raucous romp, characters speak of general strikes, unions and communism – talk that we can never quite get enough of during our troubled times. There are also scintillating performances by this energetic ensemble deftly directed by Michael Rothhaarr. Norman Scott as the menacing toothpick chewing thug Sullivan Slift has a death’s head reminiscent of the Grim Reaper in Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film, The Seventh Seal. With her over the top sexuality that mingles an obsession with machinery, money and libido, Becker is a hoot as the capitalist Cridle, who’d be right at home as a waitress at Hooters. Daniel Riordan’s Graham sports a sort of bowler hat and cane with a Mack the Knife panache, which is appropriate, as Brecht’s Macheath was the dramatist’s symbol of predatory capitalism. Since property, as the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon observed, is theft, it should be duly noted that with her virtuoso performance as the title character, Vosylius steals this show.

Another honorable mention should go to Norman Scott who, in addition to playing ghoulish henchmen, is the set and lighting designer for Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses. His innovation of introducing puppet-type creations expands the mise-en-scene of this mass spectacle, which also uses a grating chainlike device and noise for scenic transitions. This, of course, is in keeping with Brecht’s notion of a theatre of “alienation” – the jarring sound snaps one out of the typical reverie of watching a bourgeois drama through the proverbial fourth wall. Rather than merely emote, Brecht wants audiences to think about his dramas and their messages, and the irritating noise serves to remind viewers that they are not watching real life, but rather a play – which they should think about, in order to change the real world.

Since this is a play about capitalist crimes, it should be mentioned that it's sort of “criminal” for such a great play about big business to be performed in such a small theatre space. Michael Rothhaar’s Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses is such a first rate production that it deserves to be presented in a far larger venue for a bigger audience. But until the Ahmanson or Broadway pick it up, Brecht’s Saint Joan of the Slaughterhouses will be featured at the Pacific Resident Theatre’s 30ish seat Co-Op space at 707 Venice Blvd. on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 pm, and Sundays at 3 pm, through Aug. 9.

For more info call (310)822-8392 or see: www.PacificResidentTheatre.com.

LAFF 2009: DEAR LEMON LIMA

A scene from Dear Lemon Lima.

This coming-of-age movie may be no lemon but it raises questions about indigenous authenticity.

By Ed Rampell

Suzi Yoonessi’s Dear Lemon Lima, which is nominated for the Los Angeles Film Festival’s $50,000 Narrative Competition prize, is a heartfelt bittersweet coming-of-age story set in Fairbanks, Alaska.

The protagonist is a rarity in contemporary cinema: Vanessa Lemor is a part Yup’ik 13-year-old girl poignantly and playfully portrayed by Savanah Wiltfong. Yup’iks are Alaskan Natives who are related to Inuits, and throughout Dear Lemon Lima indigenous culture is paid lip service by the prep school Vanessa attends as its sole scholarship student.

In the opening Vanessa rejects a backpack her indigenous grandmother has sent her for being “too ethnic,” and she moons after an all-American white boy, Philip (the appropriately smarmy, smug Shayne Topp). The fair-skinned Vanessa even dyes her hair blonde at one point, in order to fit in more with her mostly Caucasian private school peers and to attract Philip, who flirts with a stereotypical dumb blonde, Megan (Meaghan Jette Martin).

Despite her efforts to conform Vanessa is consigned to the academy’s group of misfits, the FUBARS. The social pariahs consist, at first, of what appears to be a darker skinned Native girl (or is she is Asian?) named Nothing Amigone (Maia Lee), whose parents run a funeral parlor, the Asian Chin Twins (Jada Morrison and Taylor Finlon) and Hercule Howard (Zane Huett), an overprotected, diminutive white lad. When the Nichols School participates in the World Eskimo Indian Olympics (WEIO is an actual sporting competition) the offbeat subject matter is offset by that standard predictable plot ploy of the outsiders surprising everybody (except viewers who have already seen movies like The Dirty Dozen and The Bad News Bears) by excelling and surpassing pat expectations.

There’s no doubt that Dear Lemon Lima, with its quirky animation and emotions worn on its sleeve, is a crowd pleaser, as well as a well-directed, affecting picture about adolescence. It is a sort of more lighthearted the 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut’s 1959 New Wave classic about troubled childhood) with a female touch. It doubtlessly deserves a wide audience, and, perhaps, LAFF’s Narrative Competition award. Writer-director Yoonessi said she wanted to make a film that promoted “love and kindness,” and she has richly succeeded in doing so. Yet the feature raises certain questions.

In the end, it is Vanessa’s knowledge of the Yup’ik culture she had earlier scorned that makes her a winner at the WEIO contest. As William Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, “To thine own self be true.” However, it is the indigenous subject matter that’s so integral to Dear Lemon Lima that made the antennas of this film historian -- who has co-authored/authored three movie history books that deal with the topic of ethnic representation and misrepresentation onscreen – go up. There is a long tradition dating at least as far back as Robert Flaherty’s 1922 semi-documentary classic Nanook of the North and to Ray Mala’s 1932, Igloo, and 1933, Eskimo of Alaskan and North Pole, where tribal peoples are depicted on the silver screen. The actress who portrays Vanessa is, like her character, part Yup’ik. Writer-director Yoonessi, however, is an Iranian-American who does not seem to be especially knowledgeable about the culture she represents onscreen, although to be fair Yoonessi claims she did research aspects of the Alaskan Native way of life. But the biggest undercutting of the film’s pretensions of cultural authenticity and legitimacy is that it was shot not in the 49th State, but rather in Washington State (where she used actual Yup’ik dancers residing in the Evergreen State). When I asked Yoonessi why she used Washington to double as Alaska, her answer was basically because of the former’s “tax incentives.” Apparently Gov. Sarah Palin was too busy shopping 'till she dropped for haute couture, shooting moose and feuding with David Letterman to try and lure filmmakers to America’s largest – and arguably wildest – state to make movies.

Be that as it may, money trumped cultural integrity, and as one who has never been to Alaska my sense of Dear Lemon Lima providing a window into that far away place and its remote people was diminished by its inauthentic locations. I guess if you’ve seen one northwestern state, you’ve seen them all. Did the filmmakers, like Vanessa’s prep school, merely pay lip service to indigenous culture? I would have liked to see what contemporary Alaska is really like with a film actually shot on location there. Nevertheless, Dear Lemon Lima remains well worth seeing and this audience pleasing dramedy has deservedly secured a third LAFF screening Junr 27, 4:15 pm., at the Landmark Theatre.

LAFF 2009: WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE

When You're Strange offers a window into the Doors.

Beyond the doors of perception.

By Ed Rampell

Like 2006’s The U.S. vs. John Lennon Tom DeCillo’s new Doors documentary, When You’re Strange, is a great reexamination of not only musicians but of the era that spawned them. DeCillo wisely provides some historical context for the sizzling sixties, firmly placing Jim Morrison, Ray Manzarek, John Densmore and Robby Krieger in the turbulent times that, as the Lizard King himself put it, the Doors’ music reflected and grew out of.

Were the Doors avatars of a new consciousness, tuned into alternate realities, as the group’s name, borrowed from a William Blake poem, and songs such as "Break On Through (To the Other Side)" suggest? Were they, and in particular with Morrison’s poetic lyrics, the counterculture’s muses? When You’re Strange explores this with Johnny Depp’s insightful narration and through you-are-there archival footage of the Doors onstage, offstage and backstage, from Sunset Strip’s Whiskey A-Go-Go to "The Ed Sullivan Show" to live concerts at the Isle of Wight, mass arenas and beyond. (By the way, unlike Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, who changed their lyrics to suit the square Sullivan’s strict rules, Morrison the rule breaker refused to compromise when singing "Light My Fire" on the highly rated CBS variety show. And to this date the Doors’ music hasn’t been used in a car commercial, either, much to the surviving members’ credit.)

I know a little something about Morrison because I lived at Guam, where Jim is believed to have spent part of his childhood, as his father was reputedly a Navy admiral at this American colony in the Western Pacific. In any case, his father played an important part during the Vietnam War. My own interpretation of Morrison, his role in rock music and his slide towards self-destruction is that he was full of angst and guilt due to his father’s role in the Indochina genocide. On the one hand, you had Admiral Morrison on the Pentagon’s side, and on the other, you had his unloved son, leader of the counterculture, who believed in making love, not war, and at one point in "When You’re Strange" advocates "total democracy.” It was all too much for the angry angel, who, like fellow revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat, fell from his perch in a Parisian bathtub (unless you are one of those who believe that Morrison pulled an Eddie and the Cruisers-like disappearing act).

The best part for me of experiencing this film was being lucky enough to sit behind Ray Manzarek, who looks fit and healthy at 70. In a sort of split screen experiential mode, I kept one eye on the screen and one orb on Manzarek, watching his reactions to what was, after all, largely his life story unfolding on the silver screen.

FILM REVIEW: SURVEILLANCE

Just doing our bloody job, mam. A scene from Surveillance.

In hot blood.

By Ed Rampell

If you want to watch Julia Ormond or Bill Pullman or Cheri Oteri in light romantic and/or comedy roles, rent DVDs of Sabrina, Sleepless in Seattle or Saturday Night Live. don't watch Surveillance.

By far the most frightening feature I’ve seen since No Country for Old Men, with the most terrifying villain(s) this side of Javier Bardem’s relentless, unstoppable killing machine Anton Chigurh in that Coen Brothers Oscar-winner. Jennifer Lynch’s Surveillance has all the preternatural creepiness that is the hallmark of the work of her father, Twin Peak-er David Lynch, Surveillance’s executive producer.

This is Blue Velvet, Lost Highway and Mulholland Dr. on overdrive and high octane. From the get-go in a horrifying title sequence, some serious serial killers are on the loose, slicing and dicing their ways across the Midwest. The Feds are dispatched to assist the outgunned and outwitted local police force of this Smalltown, USA, whose unprofessional excessive (if gleeful) use of force would make Rodney King and ex-LAPD chief Daryl Gates feel right at home. The French Connection’s hardboiled detective Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) and his more easy-going partner Buddy Russo (Roy Scheider) would also admire their turning of the “good cop/bad cop” shtick into a high art form.

A Middle American family including Mom (Oteri) and her innocent if prescient daughter. Stephanie (Ryan Simpkins), are taking a not-so-happy road trip and druggies Johnny (Mac Miller) and Bobbi (with Pell James skillfully playing the archetypal bad girl to the hilt) are ensnared in the madness and mayhem of multiple murderers and Smalltown’s finest (including French Stewart and Kent Harper as Officers Jim Conrad and Jack Bennett and Michael Ironside as Captain Billings). Pullman and Ormond arrive at the piss ant courthouse as the new sheriffs in town, FBI agents Sam Hallaway and Elizabeth Anderson, who will crack the crimes while interviewing witnesses with their fancy schmancy high tech surveillance equipment and techniques.

The latter probably accounts for this movie’s title, however, given our day and age of warrentless wiretapping, government eavesdropping and big brother watching you, this is probably a misnomer. Nevertheless, the story, which was co-written by Lynch and Kent Harper, has a sly plot twist that I didn’t see coming from a mile away. Amidst all of the bloodshed, only one of the characters does in this excessively violent but skillfully directed switcheroo that will keep viewers on the proverbial edge of their seats.

If being scared out of your wits is your cup of blood, then Surveillance is for you.

FILM REVIEW: THE STONING OF SORAYA M.

He who has sinned may cast the first stone in The Stoning of Soraya M.

Between a rock and hard place

By Ed Rampell

This hard-hitting (no pun intended) pro-women’s rights film isn’t exactly a frothy romantic musical comedy, and viewers need strong stomachs to sit through the extremely violent The Stoning of Soraya M.

It is based on a true story about the ritual mob murder of an Iranian woman (portrayed by Mozhan Marno, who also appeared in Traitor and Charlie Wilson’s War). Soraya is setup on charges of adultery by her philandering husband Ali (Navid Negahban, who also acted in Charlie Wilson’s War), who expediently abuses Sharia Law to dispose of his wife.

The ensemble cast also includes the superb Tehran-born actress Shoreh Aghdashloo -- who was Oscar-nominated for her role opposite Ben Kingsley in House of Sand and Fog -- as the heroic Zahra. Jim Caviezel portrays Freidoune Sahebjam, the correspondent reporting for Western news outlets who stumbled upon the hate crime and wrote the 1994 book this film is based on. Caviezel co-starred in Terrence Malick’s 1998 The Thin Red Line and also played the title role in The Passion of the Christ.

The tie-in to Mel Gibson’s Jew-hating cinematic screed is revealing, as Soraya’s director/co-writer, Cyrus Nowrasteh, an American of Iranian ancestry, wrote and co-produced the rightwing ABC mockudrama The Path to 9/11. Beneath the veneer of Soraya’s feminist façade lurks some pro-Shah dialogue and sentiments. The film is also curiously timed to open in (what the Ayatollah Khomeini called) the Great Satan’s cinemas shortly after Iran’s elections. Although your humble scribe is no fan of Islamicist (or any other religious) extremism, I really don’t recall any presidential elections held in Iran while the CIA-installed Shah (who helped overthrow a democratically-elected government, as President Barack Obama recently confessed in his Cairo speech) was in power, although I do remember the vicious torture his SAVAK secret police inflicted upon dissidents.

Having said that, Nowrasteh’s naturalistic touch and cinematic flourishes during the actual stoning (with enough cruelty to do his fellow rightwinger Gibson proud) are well-directed. But the movie’s power is marred and undercut by the conservatism of the writer/director of the 2001 made-for-TV-movie The Day Reagan Was Shot, for Nowrasteh is an ideologue who simply can’t resist injecting propaganda into an already hard to take film. Stonings are, of course, despicable, but viewers should bear in mind that they also take place outside of Iran, including at such seemingly peaceful places as missionary/Christian-dominated Samoa, where there isn’t a Muslim in sight.

LAFF 2009: REHJE

A scene from Anais Huerta and Raul Cuesta's Rehje.

Much ado about working woman.

By Ed Rampell

I suppose that co-directors and co-producers Anais Huerta and Raul Cuesta’s Rehje is a worthy documentary about a displaced female worker from Mexico’s countryside who is uprooted and goes to the big city. But the doc’s protagonist is not compelling, nor is the story eventful. The countryside isn’t particularly picturesque either. A few of the film’s scenes are stylishly shot, but overall, this is an old fashioned, conventional documentary in terms of form and content.

To tell you the truth, this was a dull doc and not really worth going out of one’s way to see, unless one is particularly obsessed with Mazahua’s natives.

The Los Angeles Film Festival is screening Rehje 2:30 p.m., June 25, at The Regent.

LAFF 2009: BANANAS

Swedish director Fredrik Gertten drives Dole Bananas!

Yes, we have no bananas.

By Ed Rampell

The most controversial Swedish cinematic brouhaha in America since the X-rated I Am Curious (Yellow) was seized by U.S. Customs is now taking place in Los Angeles. as the Los Angeles Film Festival goes bananas. While sex was at issue in Vilgot Sjoman’s 1969 film, what’s at stake in Swedish director Fredrik Gertten’s film Bananas! is sterility.

The doc is a scathing critique of Dole Food’s spraying of poisonous pesticide on that yellow fruit, exposing the workers who cultivate and harvest it. Bananas! indicates that the multi-national corporation knowingly and recklessly exposed Nicaraguan plantation workers to DBCP after Dow Chemical withdrew it from the market in the late 1970s and the pesticide was banned in America, causing mass infertility amongst banana campesinos.

The Central Americans won an unprecedented court victory against Dole in an L.A. court in 2008. However, after Gertten completed his documentary, Judge Victoria Cheney dismissed the cases in April 2009, charging fraud. The plaintiffs’ attorney, Juan Dominguez, was ordered on June 15 to appear before L.A. Superior Court for a hearing on sanctions for alleged contempt of court. The $8 billion Dole corporation is also threatening both the LAFF and Gertten with what appear to be “slap suits” designed to stifle freedom of speech. (For more information see: http://www.bananasthemovie.com/.)

In a case of “yes, we have no bananas,” Dole Food pressured the L.A. Film Festival to remove Bananas! from the Best Documentary competition and for a disclaimer to be handed out to audiences and read by an LAFF honcho before the screening of the doc, due to “the threat of litigation.” Confessing that “we are not eager to be sued” LAFF relented in the aforementioned ways, but the Festival nevertheless went ahead and showed the film twice. Gertten passionately introduced his out of contention doc Tuesday night and after its screening the Swedish helmer participated in a panel with other documentarians, discussing the ethics of nonfiction cinema and the merits – and demerits – of Gertten’s film.

In this free speech donnybrook what is being lost sight of is Gertten’s film itself, which is an extremely well crafted, powerful chronicle of an important issue. If one looks closely, the viewer can see Dole’s side of the story also being told, in that witnesses on the stand appear to be dissembling and attorney Dominguez, whose personal injury ads adorn L.A. buses, can be viewed as an ambulance chasing, Ferrari driving, anti-Castro Cuban whose family fled the revolution. Gertten also protests that the movie’s message regarding what pesticides may be doing to today’s food supply and to the workers who plant and harvest them is being neglected during the current First Amendment dust up.

In any case, it is to the Festival’s credit that -- despite being under duress in this day and age of disappearing filmfest sponsors -- it went ahead and boldly screened Gertten’s doc – even if in a compromised state. And this film is doing what movies should be doing: after the Tuesday screening and panel (which ran to midnight) viewers were debating the picture’s pros and cons outside the theatre, stirring discussion about important social issues.

Bananas! Is food for thought, and LAFF’s must-see film – even if it is out of competition.

To read my recent review of another great doc that Gertten co-produced, Burma VJ, see: http://jestherent.blogspot.com/2009/05/film-review-burma-vj.html.

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LAFF 2009: CARMEN MEETS BORAT

So you want to star? A xcene from Carmen Meets Borat.

The arrival of Sacha Baron Cohen turns a ho-hum doc into a quest for justice.

By Ed Rampell

In 1969 a "Jumping Jack Flash" lightning bolt struck while the Maysles Brothers were filming the Rolling Stones’ free outdoor concert at Altamont that transformed what could have been a routine concert film into compelling cinema verite when the documentarians captured on celluloid the Hells Angels’ vicious murder of a fan. Mercedes Stalenhoef’s documentary has the most fortuitous (for the filmmaker) real life plot twist for a nonfiction director since the Maysles’ Gimme Shelter. About 40 minutes into Stalenhoef’s rather humdrum doc about the impoverished Roma (aka “Gypsy”) village of Glod, Romania, Sacha Baron Cohen and his camera crew showed up to film 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. The comedy used Glod as its insipid setting for the fictional Borat’s Kazakh hometown, mercilessly mocking them.

At the heart of Carmen Meets Borat is the issue of ethnic misrepresentation, which has plagued cinema since the celluloid stereotypes of film’s such as The Birth of A Nation. In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Civil War era epic sparked protests and boycotts by the NAACP and other outraged Blacks. In the case of Borat the indignant (and perhaps gold digging) people of Glod took their case to court with a multi-million dollar lawsuit.

In a Q&A after the LAFF screening of Carmen Meets Borat Stalenhoef said that the villagers, who did not speak English, were told that the Hollywood filmmakers were shooting a documentary. “If you make a film people should be informed of the intentions,” Stalenhoef insisted. Especially if they are depicted as figures of ridicule, rapists, abortionists and prostitutes – and paid three Euros for appearing in a movie that went on to earn boffo box office.

Truth be told, the villagers of Glod come off as unattractive, oafish, drunken louts, as the titular Carmen has pretensions of transcending her small town milieu by becoming Spanish (which she learns to speak by watching TV soap operas). This village’s cup of idiots runneth over. Along the way, the tropes of Roma as fortune telling, caravan riding, baby kidnappers are belied. The most telling moment in the doc is when Carmen’s father admits that Romanians were better off under communism, which is dealt with matter-of-factly by the filmmaker – although that’s a subject for a great documentary. In any case, it was Stalenhoef’s great piece of luck – if the villagers’ misfortune – that Borat came to town, turning an otherwise routine look at a remote hamlet into an absorbing tale of a movie maligning a people’s image.






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THEATER REVIEW: JULIUS CAESAR

Will Geer and Will Shakespeare’s toga party

By Ed Rampell

I have a friend named Fred McKinnon who’s a Manhattan playwright. Above his computer, printer, etc. – his work space where the magic takes place, except when Fred is globetrotting, doing research, play hopping at London’s West End or recharging his muse at writers’ colonies from Hawaii to Massachusetts – is a postcard bearing a picture of William Shakespeare and the words: “So I haven’t written lately. Neither has Shakespeare.” Perhaps you have to be a scribe to fully appreciate this joke, but this is one of the funniest things I’ve ever read.

Of course, if you’d written immortal masterpieces such as Julius Caesar, you’d be excused for being a slacker of a pen pal. Unlike modern scribblers such as Fred and your humble and most obedient servant, without benefit of the Internet, word processing, drama format software, etc., the poetic genius from Stratford-upon-Avon rendered classic after classic for the ages, using only a lowly low tech quill, ink and parchment. Yet the angels sang when Shakespeare wrote, and it’s astonishing how many expressions still in use in the English language are derived from the Shakespearean canon.

For example, consider Julius Caesar, which the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum premiered June 6 in its amphitheatre under Malibu’s starry, starry skies. It’s common knowledge that the phrase “et tu, Brutus?", which has come to epitomize backstabbing (literally!), originated in Shakespeare’s high drama about the lowdown Roman Empire. But did you know that the term for someone speaking gibberish also wittily began in Caesar, when Casca (Alan Blumenfeld) quipped: “but those that understood him smiled at one another and shook their heads; but, for mine own part, it was Greek to me.” Caesar’s right hand man, Marc Antony (Aaron Hendry), not Mahatma Gandhi, proclaimed: “Cry 'Havoc,' and let slip the dogs of war.” Even that popular populist 1960s exclamation in the affirmative by Black Panthers arguably emanated from this play when, during his funeral oration, Antony cried: “To stir men's blood: I only speak right on.”

But while so many of Shakespeare’s wondrous words are still perennials, it is the syntheses of swordplay and wordplay, rhyme and theme, that makes Julius Caesar as rabblerousing and timely today as it was when it opened at the Globe Theatre in 1599. As the hotheaded Antony wisely observes: “The evil that men do lives after them.” Indeed, 510 years later the plot about plotters conspiring to assassinate the head of the ancient world’s superpower remains resonant. Like the Rome of antiquity, with more than 700 military bases scattered around the world the United States of America has become an empire beset by internal inequities and endless enemies and wars abroad. Using the pretext of 9/11, just as Caesar had 2,044 years before him, George W. Bush grabbed unprecedented power, diminishing the role and rule of a representative republican form of governance as he assumed greater omnipotence. Like Caesar awaiting to be crowned absolute dictator of imperial Rome by the senate, Bush’s imperial presidency, unitary executive, warrant-less surveillance, extraordinary rendition, prolonged detention without charges, torture, etc., were the tyranny of a latter day “decider” and would-be emperor.

Julius Caesar opens with the Roman throng feting their conquering hero, who displays blithe hubris and arrogantly disdains portents of disaster. Similarly, that prating prancing preening prick of a president enjoyed widespread approval ratings when the uniform-clad wannabe warrior prematurely proclaimed “mission accomplished” on an aircraft carrier’s deck for a preemptive war we’re still, alas, mired in six years on.

From their 21st century vantage point, audiences may congratulate themselves that unlike Cassius’ cabal, we are too cultivated to settle political disputes at dagger point. On the other hand, our too, too loyal “opposition” caved, with many Democrats voting for the PATRIOT Act, to authorize the invasion of Iraq under false pretences, and supported too many Bush measures. To make matters worse, Bush was reelected and although ultimately repudiated by the electorate, now that he’s out of power our spineless senators decline to charge him with war crimes, etc. Meanwhile, his Antony, Dick Cheney, continues to sow discord with impunity. As Cassius (Melora Marshall) said: “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, Like a Colossus, and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about…”

But time will tell who were truly more refined: the Americans, who cowered in the face of despotism, or the Romans who, as Shakespeare’s most famous fictional character, Hamlet, said, “[took] arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end[ed] them," literally turning their oppressor into a bloodstained quivering mass of orange Julius (played by Carl Palmer). In another half a millennium, history shall pass judgment on who were more civilized.

Caesar’s political overtones befit the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum, which was founded after the leftwing cowboy actor (1950’s Broken Arrow and Winchester ’73) refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was blacklisted. Instead of fading away into obscurity, Geer turned his land in Topanga Canyon near Malibu into an outdoor theatre, where he also grew every plant Shakespeare wrote about. Geer went on to co-star in the 1954 classic made by blacklisted talents about striking Chicano miners, Salt of the Earth, and in the beloved 1970s CBS-TV series, The Waltons, playing Grandpa Walton.

Probably the highest compliment I can pay the Theatricum’s production of Julius Caesar is that it’s worthy of the bard. It is, to use Brutus’ (Mike Peebler) words, “a savage spectacle,” with a cast of dozens. Considering that I recently saw the one woman show, Kick, starring DeLanna Studi and the two-actor drama A Number co-starring John Heard, a cast of 40 is of near epic proportion onstage. Ellen Geer deftly directs the mass scenes, which are somewhat reminiscent of Salt of the Earth. The mise-en-scene of the battle sequences, as sword drawn Roman centurions romp over the bard’s boards, are excitingly well-choreographed, making excellent use of the open air Topanga setting. The slow motion assassination of Caesar is harrowingly cinematic.

In the best gender bending acting since Cate Blanchett played Bob Dylan in 2007’s I’m Not There, the production’s most outstanding performance is delivered by Melora Marshall as Cassius. She plays him as an overwrought conspirator, a fanatical devotee of the cause whose own ambition and zeal compels Cassius to take up arms against the man who would be king.

Julius Caesar will be performing through Sept. 26. For more information: call 310/455-3723 or see: www.Theatricum.com.

FILM REVIEW: DIM SUM FUNERAL

Buddha and body: A scene from Dim Sum Funeral.

Family Ties

By Carlin Nguyen

You know it is no traditional Chinese funeral when the siblings in the family don’t know much about their own culture. Meet: oldest sister Elizabeth (Julia Nickson) who’s a sad-stricken mother who’s marriage is at a dismal, her brother, Alexander (Russell Wong), a Manhattan dermatologist who has troubles keeping faith between wife and other women; the middle daughter, Victoria (Francoise Yip), a bitter real estate broker; and youngest daughter, Meimei (Steph Song), a martial arts actress wanting to have a baby with her lesbian lover (Bai Ling).

When the siblings get word that their not-so-dearing mother has passed, many find the news shocking. It’s only until they all arrive at the family home to see that the mother’s caretaker, Viola (Talia Shire), is being asked to fulfill one more wish from the deceased mother -- a traditional Chinese funeral -- many of the siblings find it hard to grasp what is going on. Their relationship with their mother wasn’t the best. But as the story progresses, we notice that the siblings have an intangible relationship with each other – caring and strong.

Directed by Anna Chi, Dim Sum Funeral is a movie about setting aside all problems and bringing back a family all in the same place.

FILM REVIEW: UNMISTAKEN CHILD

A scene from Unmistaken Child.

Kidding around

By Carlin Nguyen

Tenzin Zopa was just 7 when he decided to become a follower to the great Tibetan master, Lama Konchog. Now that his master has passed away at the age of 84, there’s uncertainty in the air for Tenzin as what he would do next.

Days later he receives permission from the Dalai Lama himself to find a young baby child that most represents his former master. The hardest part of this assignment: get permission from the kid's parents to let the monastery take their child and take care of it.

With the help of astrology tools, Tenzin’s guided through Lama’s former homeplace as well as his own. He explores far through foot and mule, day and night, to find this child. Eventually he finds this remarkable child who best represents Lama

Surprisingly, Tenzin is no typical monk. He’s a bit shy and unprepared to know what to do next. We learned that during his learnings that everything Tenzin did was basically told by his former master. And Tenzin is a person with an overwhelming sense of humor.

At first it would have been nice to witness more of the process that goes into finding this kind of child. But once the child’s chosen and then sent off to the monastery for tests, it brings a sense of appreciation to Buddhism faith and what their daily lifestyle entails. Also, I didn’t notice a real sense of struggle for Tenzin during his search (though four years is long, I’d wish the movie stressed that than just stating the fact it took four years). Despite these drawbacks the documentary has value.

Written and directed by Nati Baratz, Unmistaken Child is an honest documentary about believing in reincarnation and soul searching for someone that best represents another person for whom passed away.