You'll have to hunt down this ambitious collection of films from around the world (September 6 through October 4) at venues in San Francisco (the San Francisco Art Institute and the Balboa Theatre), Oakland (the Grand Lake), San Jose (Mexican Heritage Plaza) and San Rafael (Smith Rafael Film Center), with a schedule of exhibition about as tricky as Amtrak's summer vacation getaways. Full info available at www.globalfilm.org.
Almost Brothers (Brazil) Another crazy slice of Brazil, a country whose superb films are a kind of anti-travel ad. Director/writer (with Paulo Lins) Lucia Murat (How Nice to See You Alive) probes 50 years in the lives of two Brazilians, Miguel and Jorge, whose careers take them to prison in the 1970s. Miguel is white from a middle-class family, his father's a musicologist; Jorge is black, his father is a never properly recognized samba artist. Based on new information about life during the 21 years of Brazil's military dictatorship, the film chronicles the separate fates of a white "political prisoner" versus a black "common criminal."
Director Murat reveals how her country's epidemic of violent, drug-selling street gangs got their start in those fetid jail cells. A hard look at a vibrant if scary culture that is really struggling to get its shit together on race, class and poverty — a cautionary tale for much of this hemisphere.
Border Cafe (Iran) Director/writer Kambozia Partovi delivers a minor gem in this tale of a young widow's efforts to run a small truck-stop restaurant near the Turkish border. To preserve the only asset left her by her late husband Ishmael, Reyhan (Fereshtei Sadre Orafei) must raise two children, keep her head covered, cook around the clock for a boisterous crowd of truckers, while resisting a bullying brother-in-law, Nasser (Parviz Parastoei), claiming not only his late brother's estate but also the right to take his widow as a second wife.
Partovi frames his story as a series of flashbacks told by a Greek truck-driver who sees the widow as a replacement for a wife who skipped out on him; and a young girl, an abused Russian runaway, whom Reyhan shelters from predatory men and police looking for unattached females.
The only moment Orafei permits Reyhan's growing despair to peek through is a scene where she discovers that her son has been smoking his uncle's cigarettes. Reyhan starts screaming and hitting the frightened child as if the smokes contained some dark potion destined to turn the towhead into a future Nasser.
When I was 14, my recently widowed mother was offered a new home in Florida by my late father's prosperous older brother. Watching Reyhan resist an ancient society's feudal claims, I finally realized why my mother refused my uncle's offer of passage to a land of sunshine and strangers who bore our last name.
Max and Mona (South Africa) One of those rare movie peeks at a racially divided society not told from a guilty white person's perspective, this goofy and fitfully amusing story from director Teddy Mattera (co-written with Greg Latter) involves the picaresque misadventures of one Max Bua (as in Goya), who leaves his rural village with a suit of clothes, a wad of cash (medical-school tuition) and a female companion: a goat named Mona, intended to be the main course at a wedding feast in Johannesburg. Nothing in young Max's first time in "Jo-Town" goes as expected. Soon he has a new suit and loses the cash to a rascal uncle who needs to be rescued from the clutches of a knife-wielding gangster. But he retains custody of Mona. The wily goat eats a huge stash of drugs before she herself can be eaten.
Unable to pursue his education, Max is forced to ply his only other marketable skill: his ability to cry on cue at funerals, thus allowing the souls of the dead to join their ancestors in heaven and his uncle to pocket large sums of cash from the mourners.
Overflowing with colorful characters, including the cross-dressing, jive-talking cosmetician "son" of an unscrupulous white funeral director, Max and Mona comes at us in four languages, all subtitled, including a very dialect-driven brand of English. Extremely bawdy, not as funny as it could have been, but an authentic take on a rough-and-tumble subculture, where death is never on holiday.
Global Shorts An exceptionally well-crafted and moving collection of short films from five spots on the planet where life is seldom as one might wish it to be.
Elephants Never Forget (Venezuela/Mexico) Director Lorenzo Vigas Castes delivers a dark tale of revenge that goes unexpectedly awry. A brother and sister barely into their teens are planning to murder their bastard of a birth-father. The gun is loaded, the teens are determined, but Dad turns out to be a bit more of a challenge than they had bargained on. The ending works even if you see it coming.
Harvest Time (China) The longest piece in the program, director Zheng Zheng's drawn-out and slowly paced description of a young college graduate's bumpy return to his native village pays off in its unvarnished glimpse at a society that is often hard for Westerners to appreciate or embrace.
Little Terrorist (India) Director Ashvin Kumar provides an unexpectedly gentle fable about a young Muslim boy's "good luck" when an errant cricket ball lands across the disputed border between Pakistan and India, and a kindly Hindu schoolteacher shaves his head to save his ass.
More than the World (Argentina) Director Lautaro Nunez de Arco's gorgeously filmed short describes the incredible consequences when a young man's attempt to date a peasant woman goes fatally amiss, but not before he sends a farewell letter from prison to the love of his life.
Source of History (Burkina Faso) Adama Roamba gives a moving and sobering account of children at war in a sadly beautiful landlocked country known to its former European masters as Upper Volta.