February 24, 2016
Black History Month
Arts &
ENTERTAINMENT
Films to See Before PIFF Closes
The regular schedule of the
Portland International Film Fes-
tival runs through Saturday, Feb.
27, and encore screenings will oc-
cur on Sunday, Feb. 28. My favor-
ite ilm so far has been “Thru You
Princess,” an Israeli documentary
about a beleaguered New Orle-
ans singer who is discovered by a
genius composer in Israel via her
YouTube posts; though its festival
run is over, I am really hoping that
one gets a theatrical release. A bi-
opic about Hank Williams, “I Saw
The Light,” is also done with its
festival run, but will get its theat-
rical release soon, and though it
takes a pretty standard approach to
telling its story, it’s worth seeing
for the ine performance of Tom
Hiddleston as Williams and for its
wonderful music.
Three of the other ilms I’ve
seen will have additional screen-
ings at PIFF.
“Dheepan” won the Palme
d’Or award, the highest prize at
the 2015 Cannes Film Festival,
and expertly tells a tale of Sri
Lankan immigrants to France. Its
star was himself a child soldier
with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lan-
o PinionAted
J udge
by J udge
d arleen
o rtega
how to read the signs of danger
in the housing project where the
title character is assigned work as
a caretaker. An excellent and im-
mersive window into experiences
common to immigrants that will
play on Thursday and Friday, Feb.
25-26.
I didn’t approach “A War”
with much enthusiasm, but this
Danish ilm, nominated for this
year’s foreign language Oscar,
has much to recommend it. Its
irst half was much what I was
expecting, depicting the day-to-
day challenges faced by soldiers
in Afghanistan and speciically by
a young commander, alongside
scenes of his young wife at home
with their three young children,
struggling with the strain of his ab-
sence. What took the ilm beyond
a standard exploration of war’s
costs for soldiers and their fami-
lies is the trial in its second half,
‘Thru You Princess,’ a documentary from Israel about an aspiring
professional singer from New Orleans, gets a good review at this
year’s Portland International Film Festival.
ka who immigrated to France and
is now an acclaimed playwright,
essayist, and novelist. In his irst
leading ilm role, he is riveting
as a man whose departure from
his home country depends on as-
suming an acceptable refugee
identity as a husband and father
on the other side of the conlict he
is leaving. The ilm lingers with
an appropriate sense of disorien-
tation, gradually revealing pieces
of his story along with those of
the woman and orphaned child
who enter France as his family
members. All three are lost in so
many ways, including with each
other, and this ilm is a wonderful
example of showing rather than
telling; we struggle with the char-
acters to learn what is expected of
them, who each of them is, and
in which the commander stands
accused of ordering an attack on
civilians. That dilemma, coupled
with what went before, illustrates
well how easily civilian casualties
occur during war, the challenges
of meaningful oversight of such
decisions, and how war turns even
the best people (and audiences)
into moral relativists. A cut-above
most war ilms for its subtlety, this
ilm plays on Thursday, Feb. 25
and Saturday, Feb. 27.
“7 Letters” offers pretty slight
entertainment from a slight prem-
ise: seven writer-directors made
short ilms marking Singapore’s
50th birthday. The stories are
sweet, set in different periods,
and in most cases sentimentally
depict interesting aspects of the
mix of cultures in Singapore, the
passing of generations, and chang-
es brought by modernization. I
gravitate toward ilms with more
depth, but this one is a gentle way
to spend a couple of hours, and
plays on Feb. 25 and 27.
c ontinued on p age 14
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