The Mesilla Valley Film Society is a non-profit organization with a working board of directors and a volunteer staff, which presents alternative, foreign and independent film and video to the southern New Mexico and El Paso/Juarez areas.

Oranges and Sunshine

During the 1950s and 1960s, England shipped thousands of children, unbeknownst to their parents, to Australia, where they mostly ended up living in terrible conditions at institutions.

Oranges and Sunshine is a fictionalized and well-done account of how one social worker from Nottingham in 1986 stumbles upon the tragedy and dedicates her life to helping these now grown-up children (many with post-traumatic stress disorder) find their real parents.

Emily Watson, who always brings a special grace to the screen, gives a multilayered performance to the role of Margaret Humphreys, who not only puts her own family dynamic at risk but finds herself physically threatened.

Give credit to director Jim Loach (son of Ken) for using practically no flashbacks, which could have rendered the movie a cliche, and instead allowing the adults (including Hugo Weaving as the shell-shocked Jack and David Wenham as the bitter Len) to express successfully the pain and fear they endured as children.  sfgate.com

Jiro Dreams of Sushi

Theatre is OPEN on Memorial Day, May 28!

Tucked away in a Tokyo subway concourse, with just 10 seats and a cramped work space behind the counter, stands Sukiyabashi Jiro, a sushi bar.

This is no ordinary Japanese sushi bar, but a three-star Michelin restaurant - the guide’s highest rating, and the first ever accorded to a sushi-only establishment. It is a place where the 85-year-old chef, Jiro Ono, prepares simple trays of raw fish and rice with an obsessive quest for perfection.

David Gelb’s thoughtful and wonderful documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi, explores the dedication of this humble, bespectacled man, and the Zen-like focus he has for his work - or, as many would claim, for his art.

"You have to fall in love with your job," Ono says. "You must dedicate your life to mastering your skill."

Ono literally does dream of sushi, waking in the night with visions of better ways to serve his eel and tuna, his octopus and shrimp.

At the heart of Gelb’s film is the relationship between Ono and his two sons. Yoshikazu, the elder of the two, has worked at Sukiyabashi for decades (he’s in his 50s now) and is expected to succeed his father when he eventually steps down, or dies. Takashi apprenticed with his father and then went off to open Sukiyabashi Roppongi, a mirror-image sushi bar with its own legion of devotees. (Takashi explains that he is right-handed, his father left-handed, and thus the opposing layouts of the two restaurants.) Takashi seems less burdened by expectations. He sports a smile that suggests that working on his own, out from under his father’s shadow, has been liberating.

Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a meditation on work, on finding one’s path in life, and then walking it with singular purpose. philly.com

Sponsored in part by Empire Buffet.

In Darkness

To give the highest recommendation to a Holocaust movie is to anticipate a certain resistance in the reader. Such resistance is understandable. One might think that years and years of seeing Holocaust movies would create an immunity, a point at which you can feel no more. But in fact, it works the other way. The more you see, the worse it gets, so that at the beginning of In Darkness, watching the Nazis march naked Polish women into the woods, toward their own mass grave, I just didn’t want to go there again.

But In Darkness is an extraordinary movie, and somehow good art creates its own uplift. This film rises to its subject, so that the overall experience of it is far from dispiriting. Poland’s candidate for the best foreign film Oscar - it has a real chance of winning on Sunday - deals with real-life events in the city of Lvov, in the last year of the German occupation. It’s a gripping piece of history and also an exploration into the mysteries of the human soul.

The mysterious soul in question is that of Leopold Socha a Polish Christian who works as a sewer worker but augments his income with shady deals and thievery. Socha is nice enough to his wife and daughter, but there is no way to call him a nice guy.

One day, a group of Jews comes to him and asks for his help because he knows the sewers better than anybody, and he can hide them there. He agrees, but for a price. He has no apparent human sympathy and, at first, even considers double-crossing them.

But something happens inside Socha - and this is a big part of what makes In Darkness so effective and truthful: The change in him is never stated in an overt way. Nor is there some Movie Moment of transition, in which he goes from mercenary to compassionate. Rather we just watch as his life becomes increasingly taken up with bringing food and provisions to the Jews in hiding, despite considerable personal risk. We see the change in him expressed in action and in hints.

Physically, much of the movie takes place in the sewers (with part of the movie filmed in an actual sewer), and though the frame is dark, the setting is vivid - you can almost smell it and feel the damp.  

This may, in the end, be Holland’s point, though if you see In Darkness, you might very well come up with something different: It’s possible to have courage without humanity. But it’s impossible to have humanity without courage. sfgate.com

The Fairy

Deeply silly in a classic mode, The Fairy continues the French new wave of near-silent cinema. It’s the third in a series of clownish comedies made by a trio of writer-director-actors: Belgian Dominique Abel, Canadian Fiona Gordon and Frenchman Bruno Romy. Shaped by years on the road as neo-vaudevillians, their sensibility owes as much to 19th-century stage business as to Charlie Chaplin and Jacques Tati.

The sad-sack presence in the eye of the movie’s farcical hurricane is a hotel night clerk named Dom (Abel). After his bicycle chain slips off repeatedly as he is commuting to work in the rain, Dom dares indulge a dream: He’d like a motor scooter. Luckily, the second guest to arrive that evening is Fiona (Gordon), who identifies herself as a fairy and offers to grant him three wishes. He can think of only two.

The next day, Fiona delivers: a Vespa and a lifetime supply of gasoline. But there is reason to suspect she is more maniacal than magical. After Dom and Fiona spend an enchanted evening together, she is apprehended and returned to the asylum from which she escaped. (It’s a high-rise, which makes Fiona the fairy-tale princess held in a dark tower.)

Still, there is some sort of voodoo in Fiona, as she proves by becoming nine months pregnant overnight. Her bulging form complicates Dom’s daring rescue, and soon Fiona has given birth to a great action-comedy prop: a helpless infant. For the film’s various preposterously precarious bits, Jimmy (Lenny Martz) is almost as useful as Mimi, the little white mutt who is smuggled into the no-dogs-allowed hotel by British tourist John English (Philippe Martz, the baby’s real-life father).

English speaks only phrasebook French — although rather too well — so he’s another outsider in a town run by officious nurses and ineffectual cops. Soon, English is involved with Dom and Fiona in a plot to smuggle three African refugees to Britain. This involves a lot of running and driving around, often with Jimmy at risk of becoming roadkill. Among the hazards is a car under the command of a bartender (co-director Romy) so nearsighted that he is essentially blind.

The films virtues are considerable, and suitably old-fashioned: physical dexterity, sustained visual gags that reliably pay off, and long takes that sometimes hide a scene’s most outrageous events in the background or off to one side. For all its brazen goofiness, The Fairy is subtly designed to reward careful viewing. npr.org

The Salt of Life

Rueful, funny and wise, The Salt of Life is a comedy not of errors but of the tiniest of missteps. A warm yet melancholy film of quiet yet inescapable charm, it has a feeling for character and personality that couldn’t be more delicious.

That a film as delicate, personal and small-scaled as Salt of Life, directed and co-written by Italy’s Gianni Di Gregorio, exists at all is a function of fate and chance. Di Gregorio, who also stars, acted as a young man before beginning what became an accomplished screenwriting career.

Di Gregorio plays Gianni, a man of a certain age named after himself, who has to deal with a formidable mother, played in both films by the now 96-year-old force of nature Valeria de Franciscis Bendoni, a woman with the bright clothing, big jewelry and blond wig of someone a third of her age.

Though they have similar character traits, Gianni and his mother have quite different back stories in both films. Here the mother, a self-centered spendthrift, lives with young caretaker Kristina (Kristina Cepraga) in an elaborate Roman mansion while her son lives in an apartment across town and has trouble making ends meet.

The ultimate accommodating child, Gianni is used to catering to his mother’s every whim, even driving long distances to simply adjust a knob on her television. Always the gentleman, too polite to insist on anything, Gianni’s impeccable manners have him saying "certo" (certainly) to almost any request.

Himself a tireless womanizer, Alfonso tells Gianni he should have some romance in his life (the fact that he is already married doesn’t seem to cross anyone’s mind). It’s a thought that Gianni has never had before.

Suddenly this middle-aged man starts to notice all the attractive women in his Trastevere neighborhood. When he realizes that even one of his ancient neighbors has a girlfriend, it seals the deal and Gianni starts to wonder whom the new flame in his life might be.

With a series of looks that range from resigned to fed up, Di Gregorio’s sad, overmatched expressions make it impossible not to sympathize with him. The Salt of Life is finally not about chasing women so much as it is about a man realizing he is getting older and trying to figure out, with increasingly amusing desperation, what if anything can be done about it. latimes.com

Footnote

Footnote is a film about Talmudic research, close analysis of the ancient writings on Jewish law. Talmudic scholars are detail oriented by trade, and the two in close-up here are a father and son long at odds, both emotionally and intellectually.

Eliezer Shkolnik,the father, is the traditionalist who compares himself to an archaeologist combing through pot shards. He pores over evidence - so much so that he once spent 30 years pursuing a breakthrough that collapsed when a rival published first. Uriel Shkolnik  is the successful, admired, cutting-edge son, the one who expounds on gender and culture and the de-feminization of the Jewish man. Uriel gets the accolades, the academy membership, the adoring looks from women. Eliezer’s biggest triumph is a footnote: his name in the masterwork of a revered scholar.

Israeli writer-director Joseph Cedar imbues his tale of academic maneuvering, misunderstanding and mystery with the zest of passion and the zing of intrigue, It’s a vivacious film, having its little fun with suspense-flick conventions (including Amit Poznansky’s bouncing score) that build to a climactic finish.

Its energy and eccentricity assert themselves in funky graphics, imaginative camerawork and everyday moments of awkwardness and absurdity. In a pivotal scene, people crowding a tiny room stand and rearrange their chairs each time someone opens the door to come or go. It’s one of many small but inspired comic touches that lightens the drama.

The two leads don’t look alike, but it’s easy work accepting them as a combative, complicated father and son. And it’s easy to see the passion they feel for the Talmud. sfgate.com

Monsieur Lazhar

Based on a one-person play by Quebec’s Évelyne de la Chenelière, there are no heroes or villains in this transcendent film, which was one of the five contenders for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 2012 Academy Awards.

Simon and Alice are both outsiders at their school. While others play together with their friends, they stand off to the side. One morning, Simon is shocked when he discovers the hanging body of their teacher in their classroom. An incident that happened between them in the past causes him a great deal of pain and guilt. He becomes very aggressive, much to the sadness of other teachers in the school.

When Bashir Lazhar, an Algerian immigrant who claims to have taught school for 19 years, expresses interest in the empty teaching position, the school principal hires him. At first he has trouble with the class since they are used to Martine’s teaching style, but he gradually wins their respect by acknowledging his own vulnerabilities and honestly expressing his opinions to them when asked. His favorite student turns out to be Alice who loves the beautiful colors of Algeria and shares her raw feelings about the suicide in a courageous speech. She doesn’t see much of her single parent mother who is an airline pilot.

One of the reasons why Bashir is so transfixed with the suicide and the grief of his students is that he has been a victim of violence. His wife and children were targeted and killed in a bomb explosion by terrorists in Algeria. When the school psychologist’s suggestions don’t seem to be helping the children, Bashir tries his own approach, but this gets him in trouble.

Monsieur Lazhar opens a window to the knotty problem of suicide which has long been a taboo topic.  We are grateful to those behind this touching story for showing us the aftereffects of such a tragedy and what wonders can be done by caring and compassionate souls like Bashir Lazhar. spiritualityandpractice.com