The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival has announced its 2005 program. This year’s festival includes films from Australia, Japan, Germany, Poland, and, of course, BROOKLYN!
“Abel Raises Cain” (Jenny Abel/ Jeff Hockett: USA) opens the festival, exploring the life of filmmaker Jenny Abel’s father, Alan Abel, the infamous prankster who has pricked the media and aroused the public with his seemingly nonsensical ideas for over 40 years. “The Phantom of the Operator” (Caroline Martel: Canada) closes the five day festival with science poetically meeting fiction in a montage of ephemeral, archival telephone operator films, revealing new meaning about little-known chapters of both industrial and cinematic history.
Other features include the rarely screened New York premiere of “Indiana Jones: The Adaptation” (Chris Strompolos/ Erik Zala: USA), the shot-for-shot adaptation of Spielberg’s original; “I, Curmudgeon” (Alan Zweig: Canada), interviews with Andrew Currie, Bruce La Bruce, Fran Lebowitz, Harvey Pekar, Andy Rooney, and Scott Thompson, all fed-up and sharing their thoughts and experiences on the state of current affairs; “Home” (Matt Zoller Seitz: New York City), the directorial debut of New York Press film critic and Star-Ledger television columnist Matt Zoller Seitz who Brooklyn-izes the power and necessity of appearance, status, and testosterone in a world where art and money collide; “Egoshooter” (Oliver Schwabe: Germany), is the story of a boy with a movie camera who turns it back on himself to catch various youthful highs and lows and everything in between; and “Longevity” (Eric Swain: USA), an outlandish action and sci-fi adventure, which yields air-to-ground missile attacks, evil henchmen, generational feuds, and real burning cars.
The documentaries should not be missed: “Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat” (Zev Asher: Canada), which follows the public outcry, arrests, convictions, and inherent questions of art, culture, politics, and public opinion of animals in response to three individuals who, enraged by the view of domesticated animals versus the mass consumption of other animals, mutilate a cat on film; “Mardi Gras: Made in China” (David Redmon: Brooklyn, NY), which causes the annual New Orleans Mardi Gras to bring to mind images of Chinese sweatshops, with the beaded symbols of revelry linking two worlds sharply divided by socio-economic opinion and (dis)advantages; and “The Concrete Revolution” (Xiaolu Gou: UK), a commentary on unseen changes in values and social costs of the new China by filmmaker/novelist Xiaolu Gou.
For more info, visit the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival.
