February 11, 2015
The
Portland Observer Black
History Month
Page 9
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East County
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Alberta
North Portland
An innocent grandson is swept up in turmoil in ‘The President,’ a film about a dictator fleeing murderous revolutionaries bent on revenge. The film plays on Sunday, Feb.
15 and Tuesday, Feb. 17 at the Portland International Film Festival.
in
World Focus
D ARLEEN O RTEGA
I have seen a host of wonderful films in the first week of
the Portland International Film Festival. Here are some screen-
ings you can still catch, ranked from my most to least
favorites. I’ve also included two films whose festival run is
over but are expected to get a theatrical release:
“The President,” a Georgian/French production directed
by Iranian Mohsin Makhmalbaf, is one of my favorites of the
festival so far. Set in an unknown country, it begins with a
window into the lives of a dictator and his family, who live in
obscene luxury and rule ruthlessly. The opening scene
between the dictator and his grandson, who is maybe four or
five years old, made my blood run cold. Soon after the
dictator’s wife and daughters leave the country he is over-
thrown and is forced to flee with his grandson who had
insisted on staying behind. For most of the rest of the film,
they are fugitives, posing as street musicians. They encoun-
ter people who suffered under the dictator’s rule, witness
atrocities in the wake of the revolution, and end up traveling
with people who were imprisoned and tortured on orders of
the dictator. The interactions with child and grandfather
serve as a lens into the values that both have been taught and
that the dictator has inculcated. (Plays on Sunday, Feb. 15
BY
and Tuesday, Feb. 17)
Another Georgian film, “Corn Island,” also captured my
imagination. A river that forms Georgia’s border with the
breakaway republic of Abkhazia changes dramatically with
the seasons; from spring until fall, the waters recede to form
tiny islands with fertile soil that don’t belong to either
country. This nearly wordless film depicts the lovely, hard,
and self-contained life that an old Abkhaz farmer builds for
himself and his teenage granddaughter on one such island,
beginning with nothing, building a small hut, plowing the
earth, and planting corn that has the potential to get them
through the rest of the year. With no explanations, this
visceral film makes you feel the weight of the wood and tools
and straw he carries, the granddaughter’s blossoming into
womanhood, the threats of weather and politics that impinge
on their simple existence. Moving and evocative. (Plays
again on Saturday, Feb. 14)
Though slighter in its ambitions, the Spanish film "Living
is Easy with Eyes Closed” is gently satisfying in its own way.
It is inspired by the true story of a Spanish schoolteacher,
Antonio, who uses the Beatles’ music to teach English and
is such a fan that his students have dubbed him the Fifth
Beatle. Having learned that John Lennon is visiting Spain to
My best to worst
favorites at PIFF
make a film, Antonio embarks on a car trip to Almeria with the
intention of meeting his idol. Along the way, the quirky
enthusiast picks up a 20-year-old pregnant girl and a teenage
runaway fed up with his father’s authoritarian ways, and the
journey they take together is marked by Antonio’s affable
generosity and the little life lessons that Antonio finds
embedded in Lennon’s lyrics. (Plays again on Wednesday,
Feb. 11)
“The Gambler,” from Lithuania, feels like it would be best
viewed with someone who actually knows Lithuanian cul-
ture, as I suspect there are some metaphors here for Lithuanian
society that would be interesting to explore. The story
centers on Vincentas, a talented paramedic who appears to
be addicted to adrenalin and calculating odds. Desperate to
hit it big to pay off his mounting debts, he devises a game that
involves betting on his patients’ survival. Most of his fellow
paramedics join in, and soon they have created a major
enterprise. But as the stakes mount ever higher in their games
of risk, Vincentas has pursued a romance with a gentle
colleague who wants no part in such things but is facing her
own high-stakes crisis. A cutthroat world is depicted, with
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