Director's Statement Archives

The beautifully acted late-life romance MY SAILOR, MY LOVE opens Friday.

September 20, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

This Friday we’re pleased to open a touching and charming Irish indie film My Sailor, My Love. It follows Howard (James Cosmo), a widowed sailor living alone on the coast of Ireland and struggling to care for himself. His daughter, Grace (Catherine Walker), hires Annie (Bríd Brennan) to help out around the house. Though Howard initially rejects this imposition, Annie’s charm and gentle care win him over, and the two fall in love. Annie’s large and loving family welcomes Howard into their lives, but these new relationships only serve to illuminate the depth of pain and hurt between Howard and Grace, who is facing challenges of her own. Grace’s resentment tears at Howard and Annie’s otherwise idyllic seaside love story. This windswept drama deftly balances a universal family saga with a tender and timeless romance. We open My Sailor, My Love this Friday at the Town Center, Monica Film Center and Claremont with Saturday and Sunday morning screenings at our Newhall theater.

Critics around the world have been writing about the acting. The film’s director, acclaimed Finnish filmmaker Klaus Härö, said this about his experiences working with the actors:

“The cast has been an immense joy, from the moment the roles were confirmed and when we first went on set. I would often sit very close by to the actors and get to witness what goes into their work, which left me very impressed. Sometimes when I looked around, I could see the emotions brought to surface after a take. Someone might have tears in their eyes, or the crew might burst into applause after a scene. This isn’t very common on a movie set, and it might even seem unprofessional in a way. The atmosphere at the set has been exceptional, and the actors left a very strong imprint on the whole crew.”

“Sharp writing, subtle acting, and a winning Irish setting. My Sailor, My Love will play to any nation where humans struggle to make themselves understood.” – Donald Clarke, The Irish Times

“A quiet yet profoundly powerful feature, aching in emotional sophistication and depth. Cosmo and Brennan are divine.” – Andrew Murray, The Upcoming

“A lovely indie. Klaus Härö’s gentle and special family drama has much more at play than rote tear-jerking. Magnificently shot and acted. Sailor is filled with sage wisdom and vulnerable people struggling to do the best that they can even when they are at their worst.” – Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“Prepare to be moved.” – Christopher Llewellyn Reed, Hammer to Nail

“I was motivated to place a lens on male vulnerability that includes a more empathic and compassionate gaze.” Filmmaker Aitch Alberto on ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE.

September 6, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore Leave a Comment

The many fans of Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s 2012 YA novel “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe” are abuzz about the new movie adaptation, which we are pleased to open Friday at our Glendale, Santa Monica and North Hollywood theaters. It was written and directed by a fellow fan, Aitch Alberto, who wrote the following about her filmmaking journey:

When I read Benjamin Alire Sáenz’s YA novel “Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe,” I was a different person, I read it cover to cover and it affected me to my core. At the time I didn’t understand the journey I would take but, sometimes you just jump in because life is inviting you to.

I’ve been on my journey and exploration around gender and masculinity for years and this book, these characters, and the need to tell this story have been a part of that journey, which is something I didn’t realize until recently. Ari, has been a mirror and a guide to helping me unpack my own misconceptions and internalized stereotypes around masculinity. Dante, with his naivety and fearlessness – has inspired me to embrace and fully become who I am, without concern for the ramifications. In fact, being honest about who I am and giving young people permission to do the same has become my mission.

Ari and Dante at its core tells a story of self-discovery and acceptance. And when I think about the world today and my own journey of self-discovery, I believe there is nothing more important than standing up and fully embracing who we are and being seen for it. One great lesson from the story is that when young people and anyone really are given the room to be who they are, the process of self-discovery becomes a natural part of growing up and, ultimately, a superpower.

With the film, I was motivated to place a lens on male vulnerability that includes a more empathic and compassionate gaze. My goal for the film is to help redefine masculinity specifically for the Latinx community and present us as fully realized human beings.

I wanted to make an accessible, grounded, yet elevated teen love story, playing with perspective, where we watch Ari’s unease and emotional isolation shift and expand when Dante enters his life. And by the end of the film, they are engulfed by a bold star filled sky, a hint of exaggerated realism, holding them, finally safe in the world. Through self-acceptance, they have found their place in the universe and the universe embraces them.

Visually I was inspired by the boyish wonder of “Stand by Me”, the surreal pallet of “Virgin Suicides” and the photographic choices in “Badlands,” as well as the composition and color in the photography of William Eggleston – both musing and grounded yet with an ethereal sensibility, an almost gauzy, golden, faded photo album look. There is a naturalistic quality to the book and the script that I wanted to maintain. We wanted to bring the audience into Ari’s world, making the film an immersive experience, where there is not a big formal separation between subject and audience. ~ Aitch Alberto

The “gorgeous, quietly affecting” RETURN TO DUST opens July 28 at the Royal.

July 19, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

A beautiful, allegorical gaze at changing rural China, Return to Dust follows a couple overcoming the challenges of their arranged marriage and the disdain of their families to survive, come together and make a home for themselves. We open the film Friday, July 28 at the Royal.

The writer-director Ruijun Li (River Road, Walking Past the Future) released the following statement upon the release of his film: “It is said that film is the art of time. In this sense, a movie director’s work is essentially the same to that of farmers. In movie making, we are constantly faced with issues dealing with time and life. Farmers trust land and time with their crops and livelihood, so shall we trust land and time with our movies. The words on paper, like seeds growing into harvest, are transformed by camera shots into what we remembered in our distant memories.”

“An unhurried but hypnotic portrait of two discards thrown together to scratch out a life as they weather the seasons.” ~ David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“It’s a gorgeous, quietly affecting film that finds an unassuming beauty in this simple life in rural China, but which doesn’t shy away from the extreme hardships faced by the very poorest.” ~ Wendy Ide, Guardian

“A thought-provoking [film] with beautifully-judged performances that radiate warmth and encourage empathy. It marks Li Ruijun as a significant cinematic talent.” ~ Anna Smith, Deadline Hollywood Daily

“It’s a film which is making the right people angry.” ~ David Jenkins, Little White Lies

“Return to Dust is many things — a vivid portrait of China’s hardscrabble rural north-west, an unexpected victim of state censorship — but it is first and last a love story.” ~ Danny Leigh, Financial Times

The “tender, sexy, very French” OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center.

April 26, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Other People’s Children, the French filmmaker Rebecca Zlotowski’s romantic drama about a Parisian high school teacher who falls in love with the single father of a little girl, was nominated for four Lumiere Awards, including Best Film, Director, Screenplay, and Actress, winning the latter. The film “sneaks up on you, with a depth and complexity of feeling that throws [its] glossy, idyllic opening moments into bittersweet relief.” (Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times)

Manohla Dargis in the New York Times: “When a woman falls in love in the sensitive French slice of life Other People’s Children, you may fall, too…while [Zlotowski is] very good at making the character’s romantic intoxication feel vivid and real — you vibe on the heady dreaminess of this new love — the filmmaker isn’t inside that bubble. Zlotowski is telling a story about a specific woman. She’s also telling a complex, bruising, much larger and quietly self-aware story about both the messiness of life and the fragility of bodies that exist in the real world, not just in fantasies…By the end, with delicacy and with a sympathetic if unsentimental gaze, Zlotowski has gathered together the story’s seemingly disparate, charming and aching pieces — a song, a tantrum, an illness, a misunderstood boy, a traumatic childhood accident — and turned these fragments of life into a life, one that’s as worth living as it is worth watching.”

“Deftly written, directed with a light hand and acted with honesty and heart, the picture captures moments of acute sadness without ever sinking into sentimentality.” ~ Wendy Ide, Guardian

Rebecca Zlotowski’s Director’s Statement: I began by adapting Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, a novel that confronts a man’s impotence head on. But something resisted. Not because I couldn’t project myself into this man who was unable to get hard, or who feared no longer being able to, but perhaps because I could identify too well. Gradually I recognized my own impotence, that of a 40-year-old woman without children, who wants one, and in part raises those of another woman. A stepmother without being a mother herself. As painfully commonplace as male impotence, this situation was nevertheless the starting point of a story worthy of being told, having hardly been told before.

It seemed to me that the bond which can link us to the child of another, a man we love, whose life and therefore family we share, not only has no name – we speak of motherhood, of fatherhood, not ‘step-motherhood’ or ‘step-fatherhood’ – but is also rarely depicted.

There was a kind of gap between comic book representations on one hand – the evil ‘Disney’ stepmother from a world in which women died in childbirth and were replaced by young women unwilling and ill-equipped to love children who weren’t their own, burdens that came with marriage, and on the other hand overwhelmed stepmothers in reconstituted families in unevenly successful romantic comedies.

Where was the woman who nurtured an intimate and precious connection with the child or children, she was raising for years without having any herself, while accepting the risk of being erased from the equation once her relationship with the father ended? What is to be done with this relationship when it weighs heavily on decisions of the heart? How can you still live in the same city with people you have been with, loved, cared for, but who are already sharing their lives with others?

I wanted to write this film about this secondary character using the tools of cinema. But a cinema of secondary characters, as opposed to the cinema of protagonists experiencing passion and excess in conflict. To have a new matrix of emotions prevail: friendship between men and women, tenderness between women, frustration rather than betrayal, the melancholy of missed rendez-vous with life but also the joy of successful encounters with desire, eroticism, the consolations of happiness. To focus on those transitory loves we experience between great romances… what the Americans call “on the rebound”. Rebound girl, rebound boy.

I imagined Other People’s Children in its literary and melodic dimension. Each fade out and in, every iris in and out, the skies that show the passing seasons, all should be read as chapters in a countdown in the life of a woman, of a couple and their desire.

I thought a lot about those studies of human nature from the early 1980s at which American cinema excelled: Alan Parker’s Shoot the Moon, Kramer vs. Kramer, An Unmarried Woman… definitive films about ordinary, collective experiences, with a sort of musical generosity and classical simplicity in their structures, a modesty in their depiction of these relationships that develop and disintegrate, that struggle and break apart.

Other People’s Children owes almost everything to its cast, which isn’t the case with every film. Roschdy Zem, my great ally since Savages, and Chiara Mastroianni, who agreed to join us for several scenes and who during the shoot agreed that we were breaking the rule that dictates that there is room for only one great female role in a film, not two. The film above all compensated for – I was going to say avenged! – my missed appointment over the years with Virginie Efira, who contributed with her “erotic brain,” to use the phrase coined by Anne Berest (who also acts in the film). The intelligence of her acting, her generosity, her dignity renders her the heir to the stars of those studies of human nature whose guiding spirit hovered over the film: Jill Clayburgh, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton… Women who touched me and in whom I recognized myself, for whom femininity is not a given, but something of their own making. Action, diction, reaction, seduction: there is nothing ‘in itself’ about Virginie’s femininity, but a fierce and stubborn will to be. To construct the person you want to be. And I loved her.

In a sort of ironic twist of fate, having no longer hoped for it, I discovered during prep that I was pregnant, and I shot the film while expecting a child who was born several days after we finished mixing. I felt that I was filming this love letter in solidarity with childless women – nulliparous, as the doctors say – while no longer belonging to their community without having yet joined the other.

With Other People’s Children, I wanted to simply make the film I needed to see. ~ Rebecca Zlotowski, Paris, June 8th, 2022.

“We must switch over — and fast.” Oliver Stone on his new documentary NUCLEAR NOW, opening April 28

April 19, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

As fossil fuels continue to cook the planet, the world is finally becoming forced to confront the influence of large oil companies and tactics that have enriched a small group of corporations and individuals for generations. Beneath our feet, Uranium atoms in the Earth’s crust hold incredibly concentrated energy- science unlocked this energy in the mid-20th
century, first for bombs and then to power submarines and the United States led the effort to generate electricity from this new source. Yet in the mid 20th century as societies began the transition to nuclear power and away from fossil fuels, a long-term PR campaign to scare the public began, funded in part by coal and oil interests. This campaign would sow fear about
harmless low-level radiation and create confusion between nuclear weapons and nuclear power.

With unprecedented access to the nuclear industry in France, Russia, and the United States, iconic director Oliver Stone explores the possibility for the global community to overcome challenges like climate change and reach a brighter future through the power of nuclear energy- an option that may become a vital way to ensure our continued survival sooner than we think.

We open Nuclear Now for a week-long engagement April 28 at the Monica Film Center with one-night screenings at our Newhall, NoHo, Town Center and Claremont theaters on May 1.

DIRECTORS STATEMENT:
Climate change has brutally forced us to take a new look at the ways in which we generate energy as a global community. Long regarded as dangerous in popular culture, nuclear power is in fact hundreds of times safer than fossil fuels and accidents are extremely rare.

So, how can we lift billions of people from poverty while rapidly cutting greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane — and, in many countries, coal? “Renewables” like wind and solar power can certainly contribute to this transition but are limited by weather and geography. While miracle batteries are not arriving to save us, engineers have been commercializing new, smaller nuclear reactor designs that can be mass-manufactured at low cost.

We must switch over — and fast.

This is, in my mind, the greatest story of our time — discussing humanity’s arc from poverty to prosperity and its mastery of science to overcome the modern demand for more and more energy. – Oliver Stone April 2023

“Nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama” CADEJO BLANCO opens April 21 at the Laemmle NoHo.

April 12, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

The intense drama Cadejo Blanco follows a working-class girl from Guatemala City who travels to a small coastal town hoping to infiltrate a gang and find her sister, who has gone missing. Writing in the Austin Chronicle, film critic Ali Juell called the film “a vivid and multi-dimensional story as the audience sees Sarita join Andrés’ gang…Cadejo Blanco provides international audiences with a perspective they would largely be unexposed to otherwise and confronts some of the issues facing Guatemalans today.” Demetrios Matheou of Screen Daily described the film as “a nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama that is very much a part of the country’s burgeoning film output.” We open the film on Friday, April 21 at the Laemmle NoHo.

Writer-director Justin Lerner wrote the following about the creation of the film:

Guatemala has been my second home since 2016 when I moved there to help start a film school in the capital. The development of Cadejo Blanco began a year after I arrived, when I visited Puerto Barrios, a picturesque port city on Guatemala’s northeast Caribbean coast. I was invited by one of my students, an aspiring filmmaker, who wanted to discuss the possibility of making a movie together in his hometown. While he spent days showing me possible filming locations, I was introduced to many young men and women involved in “clicas,” small disorganized gangs of young people who engage in illegal activity (robberies, drug dealing, violence, and sometimes murder) in order to survive and to make money.

Over the course of the next two years, I formed friendships with present and former members of these clicas. I interviewed dozens of them (some who were very open and let me record our talks, and others who would only talk off the record). I toured their neighborhoods, homes, and hidden places of business (called ‘safe houses’), and I even got to know some of their families.

At one breakfast I was invited to, I sat next to a funny and charismatic man who I later discovered was a professional hitman. Inspired by all the stories told to me by the young people I’d met, I put together a feature screenplay about a teenager from the capital, Sarita, who comes to Puerto Barrios in search of her missing sister. Sarita tracks down her sister’s ex boyfriend, Andrés, who is a gang member in Puerto Barrios. Positive that Andrés has something to do with her sister’s disappearance, Sarita uses a fake name and finds a way to join his clica, hoping to learn more about what happened.

Watching the news at my hotel, I was astounded by the regularity of reports of girls who had gone missing, last seen on a bus that had been robbed or taken from their houses in the middle of the night. But I also learned that unlike in other parts of Central America, where women are often relegated to selling drugs or sex, women in Puerto Barrios clicas can be given a great deal of power.

In writing the screenplay, I relied heavily on real experiences related to me by a few young women affiliated with Puerto Barrios gangs. They opened up about the dangers of being a woman forced to join a clica to survive in a city with very few opportunities. They’d lost friends and family members to violence and crime and seen other female friends disappear right after joining.

Once a full draft was finished, Mauricio Escobar introduced me to Guatemalan filmmaker César Díaz, who won Cannes Film Festival’s 2019 Critics Week Prize and Camera d’Or for his film NUESTRAS MADRES (OUR MOTHERS), and he advised me through rewrites of the script, lending his perspective as a Guatemalan filmmaker, and helped me shape the film in post as my editing partner. He also served as an Executive Producer.

Early in pre-production, I met Rudy Rodríguez, a twenty-one year old who responded to a open call, coming in on his lunch break from the auto shop where he worked. In his audition, Rodríguez, a non-actor with a history of gang involvement, spoke openly about his former affiliations with gangs in Puerto Barrios, the infant daughter he just had with his girlfriend, and the significance of the tattoos he had on each shoulder, black-inked stars, which he got to remember his deceased mother and murdered father.

When I decided to cast Rodríguez as Andrés, the film’s male protagonist, I planned out several trips back to Puerto Barrios to spend more time with him. I brought our lead actress, Karen Martínez, who I’d cast after long admiring her work in the film LA JAULA DE ORO. With the help of Tatiana Palomo, an acting coach who studied at Carlos Reygadas’ film school in Mexico and specializes in training non-professional actors to perform on film, Karen and I worked with Rodriguez to help him feel comfortable on camera.

My Guatemalan lead producer, Mauricio Escobar of La Danta Films, was able to help establish a partnership between the film and Movimientos de Esperanza, an NGO based in Puerto Barrios, who partially sponsored Rudy’s experience working on the film. Through donations, the NGO was able to bring Rodríguez to the capital to live for months before the shoot, to train with me and Tatiana Palomo. The NGO was also able to provide Rodríguez with psychological and financial counselling through the duration of pre-production and production.

The rest of the casting process lasted for two more years and involved months of meeting locals at youth centers, churches, schools, and parks. I also sought the direct participation of current and former gang members who I had done interviews with previously, offering some of them significant roles in the film playing versions of themselves. For over a year leading up to the actual shoot, I conducted workshops and rehearsals aimed at making them feel comfortable improvising on screen.

Once I had a shareable draft of the script in Spanish, I shared it with certain members of the non-professional cast and asked them to rewrite it with me, so that each scene would fit each performer’s own voice and the film would maintain authenticity to their city. I encouraged each of them to revise the script as they saw fit, even during shooting. It was a process that caused delays, and even arguments, but it helped to ensure that the realities of their lives were being properly represented on screen.

I also added a handful of professional actors from Guatemala City to the supporting cast. Brandon López, Karen Martínez’s co-star in LA JAULA DE ORO, who shared the same award at Cannes and also won an Ariel award for his performance in that film, was the only trained actor to be cast as a gang member. He led my rehearsals with the non-professionals from
Puerto Barrios, also serving as their on-set acting coach. They looked up to him, having seen him in films, and on YouTube. Juan Pablo Olyslager, who I had seen in Jayro Bustamante’s films TEMBLORES and LA LLORONA, and veteran theater actress Yolanda Coronado, were also cast in supporting roles.

After seeing the film COCOTE at a film festival, I tracked down the cinematographer, an Argentinian named Roman Kasseroller and shared an early draft of the script with him. He agreed to work on the film, and within a few months he was able to meet me in Guatemala. As we scouted locations in Puerto Barrios, Roman met most of the locals I had cast. To get them comfortable with Roman putting a camera in their faces and being around the approximation of a crew, we staged several photo shoots and even filmed a scene from the script on a digital SLR.

Throughout the development process, I would periodically return to Los Angeles to share footage with producer Ryan Friedkin of Imperative Entertainment, who provided script and casting notes, advice and helped with strategy to get the film fully financed. Once we cast all the roles and finalized the script, Friedkin brought on producer Jack Hurley from The Orange
Company, who put together the rest of the financing with Escobar of La Danta Films.

A few months after the shoot, one of the Puerto Barrios cast members, Geobanny Alvarado, was tragically murdered. Most details of his death are unknown, but he was a valuable contributor to the film, having spent months with the crew, helping us find shooting locations, as well as offering revisions to the script, not only for his own dialogue, but for other parts of the screenplay that took place in Puerto Barrios.

The film will be dedicated to Alvarado’s memory, to honor the significant role he played in the project, both on screen and off. The NGO Movimientos de Esperanza, in partnership with the film, will also be securing a number of financial scholarships and work opportunities for the actors. They will be presented in Alvarado’s name.

One of the small hopes I have for those who watch Cadejo Blanco is that they will be able to feel like they got to live in Puerto Barrios for a few hours. I also hope that in watching the film they felt they got to know Alvarado, and his cast-mates, and will miss spending time with them when the film is over, as I do.

Justin Lerner, writer-director, Cadejo Blanco

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? opens March 31.

March 22, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

A fascinating documentary/political thriller with a classic rock band at the heart of the action, What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? involves the U.S. State Department, the Nixon White House, the governments of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland and documentary footage that has been suppressed for over 50 years by one or all of the above. We open the film March 31 at the Monica Film Center with special one-night screenings and Q&As April 3 at the NoHo, April 4 at the Claremont and April 5 at the Glendale. The full Q&A schedule is here.

Director’s statement:

In early 2020, just prior to the worldwide explosion of COVID 19, Bobby Colomby, an acquaintance and founding member of Blood, Sweat & Tears, called me for a friendly check in. As a fan of the band in its heyday, I innocently asked him, “What the hell happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?”

Bobby proceeded to tell me the story of the events surrounding the Iron Curtain Tour. He mentioned that a documentary film crew had accompanied the band to shoot material for what was intended to be a theatrical documentary. That film was never released and Bobby had no idea what became of it.

I loved the mystery and intrigue behind this story, but would we be able to find that documentary footage or enough audio/visual material to tell the story effectively? I also love a good treasure hunt. So, as the pandemic was shutting the country down, my team and I began a search. Soon enough, we found references to National General Television Productions as having been the company behind the documentary and that their crew had shot 65 hours of footage during the Iron Curtain Tour.

We cast a wide net around the world to locate this footage, contacting anyone and everyone who had a connection to National General or the film crew, as well as private archives, independent storage facilities and film labs. It was one dead end after another. It appeared that the footage and related elements had completely vanished.

And then, finally, success. While searching for the raw footage, we stumbled upon a pristine print of a 53-minute version of the documentary that had been edited for television syndication. This was an unexpected find as no such version was ever broadcast. A new high-definition transfer was made from this print and watching it provided a fascinating time capsule of our nation, the world, and this group of nine young men on an unprecedented adventure from 50 years earlier. I knew then we had the makings of a fantastic documentary and, indeed, 40 minutes of the “lost” Blood, Sweat & Tears documentary is the backbone of our film.

Some additional heavy digging led us to the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where we ultimately uncovered five raw audio tapes that were recorded live during concerts on the Iron Curtain Tour. The band had a mobile 8-track machine on the tour and we later determined that their engineer had recorded a total of 18 tapes, but only these five were found.

Our search into the private collections of band members and others who were on the Iron Curtain Tour yielded hundreds of never-before-seen photographs and memorabilia. I never gave up hope of finding the 65 hours of original footage. However, after two full years of chasing down every lead and digging deep into vaults across the country as well as government storage facilities in Washington, D.C., Maryland and Virginia, we came up empty. The mystery of what became of that material remains.

This film sheds light on history through a fascinating lens. It’s not a biography of the band, nor is it just for music lovers or fans of Blood, Sweat & Tears. It’s a compelling story that explores a unique moment in time and has surprisingly powerful resonance and parallels to what’s going on in the world today. ~ John Scheinfeld

Based on Stefan Zweig’s final novella, CHESS STORY “shows how incredibly quickly a seemingly firmly anchored free world can tip over into a dictatorship.”

January 11, 2023 by Jordan Deglise Moore

Vienna, 1938: Austria is occupied by the Nazis. Dr. Josef Bartok (Oliver Masucci) is preparing to flee to America with his wife Anna when he is arrested by the Gestapo. As a former notary to the deposed Austrian aristocracy, he is told to help the local Gestapo leader gain access to their private bank accounts in order to fund the Nazi regime. Refusing to cooperate, Bartok is locked in solitary confinement. Just as his mind is beginning to crack, Bartok happens upon a book of famous chess games. To withstand the torture of isolation, Bartok disappears into the world of chess, maintaining his sanity only by memorizing every move. As the action flashes forward to a transatlantic crossing on which he is a passenger, it seems as though Bartok has finally found freedom. But recounting his story to his fellow travelers, it’s clear that his encounters with both the Gestapo and with the royal game itself have not stopped haunting him. Adapted with opulent attention to period detail by filmmaker and opera director Philipp Stölzl, Chess Story brings Stefan Zweig’s stirring final novella to life.

Chess Story opens January 20 at the Monica Film Center.

“Stölzl craftily melds the genres of period drama and psychological thriller, not for the purposes of reheated nostalgia, but to shed a cold light on the recursions of historical trauma.” ~ William Repass, Slant Magazine

“The adaptation of Chess Story is one of the rare cases in which the film has not only managed to leave the original behind, but to surpass it. Visually intoxicating.” ~ Süddeutsche Zeitung

“This film…moves because of Oliver Masucci, who acts with fantastic despair. And because of the wonderful Birgit Minichmayr.” ~ Der Spiegel

STATEMENT BY DIRECTOR PHILIPP STÖLZL

“I encountered The Royal Game [the alternative title of Chess Story] at a very early age. Zweig’s mysterious and impressive story etched itself into my memory and is one of those stories that have accompanied me in one way or another through my entire life. When Philipp Worm and Tobias Walker told me about their plans to make a new film version, I was delighted, read the screenplay with interest – and loved it.

“Our aim was to make a sensuous, intense feature film that would appeal to a wider audience with a brilliant cast, tight production and powerful visuals that really fill the whole screen. The contrast between claustrophobic imprisonment and the expanse of the ship that pounds across the Atlantic to America through the endless mist creates a field of tension in which Zweig’s literary metaphor can be told as a “big” story.

“The nice thing about the very courageous approach of screenwriter Eldar Grigorian to The Royal Game is that it represents a kind of condensation of the surreal secret that the novella already contains. The Kafkaesque pitch Zweig has chosen for his narrative becomes a decisive inspiration on the journey of the material to the big screen.

“On the one hand there is the intense, restrictive chamber play about the duel between Bartok and Gestapo man Böhm, who interrogates him and has him tortured. Then there is the – seeming – voyage to America and on board the game against the silent and enigmatic world chess champion. The persistent mist gives the journey something surreal, as if the giant ship were a barge of the dead, and the passengers mere ghosts. For this reason, the fact that this all turns out to be a dream in Bartok’s head is not a denouement or a surprise in the traditional sense, but more the final chord of a gloomily poetic tale. And finally, the prisoner’s battle against his own insanity in the solitary confinement cell, which he tries to escape from with his “mental chess” and at the same time achieves the opposite, sliding further in instead. Here, the film is an intense trip, because we are very close to our protagonist and accompany him down into the abyss and mental confusion.

“All these narrative levels are interwoven and initially “make sense.” But the longer Bartok is in solitary confinement and loses touch with reality, the more mysterious things become on the ship, the more the audience also become lost in a labyrinth that resembles an oppressive daydream. To this extent I would say that in this film, Zweig’s more distanced experimental design becomes a cathartic, intense and emotional vexatious game that will hopefully enchain and grip the audience.

“Zweig’s story did not end the way the film does. The bleak, dismal ending of his novella expresses the fear of impending Nazi world rule. We, however, know that it turned out differently, that it became light again after a dark night. And we want the audience to leave the cinema with this meaningful and encouraging certainty.

“The backdrop to all this is the true story about Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria. This political level of The Royal Game makes the film timelessly relevant because it shows how incredibly quickly a seemingly firmly anchored free world can tip over into a dictatorship. It tells of how thin the layer of skin of a civilisation is and how close to the surface barbarism lies. And it tells us in this way to be alert.” ~ Philipp Stölzl, 19 October 2020

Laemmle Theatres

The beautifully acted late-life romance MY SAILOR, MY LOVE opens Friday.

“I was motivated to place a lens on male vulnerability that includes a more empathic and compassionate gaze.” Filmmaker Aitch Alberto on ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE.

The “gorgeous, quietly affecting” RETURN TO DUST opens July 28 at the Royal.

The “tender, sexy, very French” OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN opens Friday at the Royal and Town Center.

“We must switch over — and fast.” Oliver Stone on his new documentary NUCLEAR NOW, opening April 28

“Nail-biting, evocative and utterly persuasive crime drama” CADEJO BLANCO opens April 21 at the Laemmle NoHo.

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? opens March 31.

Based on Stefan Zweig’s final novella, CHESS STORY “shows how incredibly quickly a seemingly firmly anchored free world can tip over into a dictatorship.”

laemmletheatres

Laemmle Theatres

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