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

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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Rebecca Zlotowski’s Director’s Statement: I began by adapting Romain Gary’s novel Your Ticket is No Longer Valid, a novel that confronts a man’s impotence head on.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.

Rebecca Zlotowski

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.

“Wincingly funny, stealthily emotional,” Kelly Reichardt’s SHOWING UP opens Friday.

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Oregonian filmmaker Kelly Reichardt’s fourth collaboration with actress Michelle Williams is a quietly brilliant and funny portrait of an artist and her MFA milieu. It’s also further confirmation that Williams, who can manifest characters as varied as Marilyn Monroe, Mitzi Fabelman, Gwen Verdon and now Lizzy of Showing Up, is a talent as rare as the finest actors in the language, including Daniel Day-Lewis and Meryl Streep. We open the film this Friday at the Monica Film Center and Laemmle Glendale, April 28 at the NoHo, and May 5 at the Newhall and Claremont.

“Reichardt reflects an abiding respect for artists and their freedom to explore and process while Williams inhabits the soul of a creative being in every frame and every second.” ~ Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

“The on-the-surface modesty of Showing Up is a kind of sorcery. It’s in the days afterward, when you’ve left its spell and gone back to the world, that its essence is more likely to take shape.” ~ Stephanie Zacharek, TIME Magazine

“It’s about who will turn out to be firmly on Lizzy’s side when all is said and done… The answer surprises her as well as us, and it brings this wincingly funny, stealthily emotional movie to a conclusion that feels both casual and momentous.”  ~ Justin Chang, Los Angeles Times

“Showing Up is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now.” ~ Manohla Dargis, New York Times

“Brilliantly nuanced and meticulously observed.” ~ Claudia Puig, FilmWeek (KPCC – NPR Los Angeles)

“That this moody, woozy character study falls closer to the ‘masterpiece’ side of the fence isn’t a surprise, considering it comes from Kelly Reichardt and Michelle Williams, one of the best filmmaker-actor duos of the last quarter century.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone

“What initially seems to be a slice-of-life drama eventually reveals itself as a paean to the difficulties, and rewards, of making art.” ~ David Sims, The Atlantic

“Kelly Reichardt… turns her thoughtful attention to the act of creation itself, rendering both its transcendence and mundanity with equal curiosity.” ~ Michael O’Sullivan, Washington Post

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

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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.

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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

“One of the most original American thrillers in years,” HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE opens Friday.

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Thrilling film critics (and alarming a Kansas City intelligence agency enough to release a bulletin calling the movie a security threat), we’re excited to open How to Blow Up a Pipeline this Friday at the Laemmle Glendale and Monica Film Center and April 21 at the Newhall, NoHo and Claremont.
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“Incendiary and furious, confident and courageous, the new thriller How to Blow Up a Pipeline boasts not only the best title of the year so far but also the best score, cast and itchy, charged, electric directorial vision.” ~ Barry Hertz, Globe and Mail

“One of the most original American thrillers in years, and one that draws from a deep well of movie history as it develops its characters and sets up its plot twists.” ~ Matt Zoller Seitz, RogerEbert.com

“The way that filmmaker Daniel Goldhaber pulls off what feels like a tightly wound Hollywood potboiler on what we imagine is little more than a studio caterer’s budget is, in itself, a textbook how-to example.” ~ David Fear, Rolling Stone
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“An incendiary, ticking-clock thriller about a group of self-styled insurgents with echoes of Kelly Reichardt’s Night Moves and Bertrand Bonello’s Nocturama.” ~ Adam Nayman, The Ringer

IMAGINING THE INDIAN filmmakers Aviva Kempner and Ben West in person for Q&As at the Royal and Monica Film Center.

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Imagining the Indian: The Fight Against Native American Mascoting is an award-winning documentary that examines the movement that is ending the use of Native American names, logos, and mascots in the world of sports and beyond. The film details the current uprising against the misappropriation of Native culture in a national reckoning about racial injustice that has succeeded in the removal of Confederate imagery, toppling statues of Christopher Columbus and forcing corporate sponsors of Washington’s NFL team to demand it change its most-offensive name. Imagining the Indian co-director/producer Ben West and W. Richard West Jr., founding director of the National Museum of the American Indian, will participate in a Q&A moderated by film critic Stephen Farber following the April 10 Reel Talk screening at the Royal. Subject Amy West will participate in a Q&A at the Monica Film Center following the 7:20 PM screening at the Monica Film Center on Friday, April 14. Co-directors Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg, Yoo-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg) and Ben West will participate in Q&As following the Saturday, April 15, 7:20 PM screening and the Sunday, April 16, 1:30 PM screening. Ms. West (Cheyenne) is a Professor of Psychology at USC, specializing in Native Youth Psychology.

THE UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING 35th anniversary screening with guest Lena Olin April 12.

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Laemmle Theatres and the Anniversary Classics Series present our first movie of 2023: a 35th anniversary screening of Philip Kaufman’s erotic masterpiece, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, adapted from the acclaimed novel by Czech author Milan Kundera. Kaufman wrote the screenplay with veteran French writer Jean-Claude Carriere (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Tin Drum, The Return of Martin Guerre), and they earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay of 1988. The film earned a second Oscar nod for the stunning cinematography by Sven Nykvist. The screening is Wednesday, April 12, at 7 PM at our Royal Theatre in West L.A. Film critic Stephen Farber will attend to moderate a Q&A with co-star Lena Olin, who will join via Zoom.

Set in Czechoslovakia during the Prague Spring of 1968 and the brutal Soviet invasion that followed, the film follows the romantic and political adventures of a lusty surgeon named Tomas. Three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis had his first starring role in the picture, after earning attention for his strong supporting performances in A Room With a View and My Beautiful Laundrette two years earlier. One year after Unbearable, Day-Lewis earned his first Oscar for his performance in My Left Foot. The two important women in Tomas’s life are portrayed by Lena Olin as an artist and Juliette Binoche as an aspiring photographer. Eventually Tomas marries Binoche’s Tereza, but she remains troubled by his constant philandering.

Olin had first made her mark in several plays and films directed by Ingmar Bergman, and after Unbearable, she appeared in many important films all over the world. Binoche was a newer face in 1988, but she too went on to become a major international star. A decade later she won an Oscar in another acclaimed adaptation, The English Patient. The international supporting cast of Unbearable includes Derek de Lint, Erland Josephson, Stellan Skarsgård, and Donald Moffat. Award-winning editor Walter Murch cut the film and Saul Zaentz and Paul Zaentz produced.

The story begins as an erotic comedy but takes a darker turn during the Russian invasion. Kaufman took a unique approach in dramatizing this traumatic event, blending newsreel footage of the invasion with staged scenes that were actually filmed in Paris (since Czechoslovakia remained under Soviet rule when filming commenced in 1986). When Tomas refuses to denounce his own anti-Russian writing from before the invasion, he loses his job, and he and Tereza must struggle to survive.

Critical response to the film was overwhelmingly positive. Variety called Unbearable “a richly satisfying adaptation.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley agreed that Kaufman’s film was an “eloquent adaptation of Milan Kundera’s erotic novel” and added that the film “stirs the heart, the hormones and the head.” Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert declared, “What is remarkable… is not the sexual content itself, but the way Kaufman has been able to use it as an avenue for a complex story, one of nostalgia, loss, idealism and romance.”

Lena Olin will participate in a Q&A before the screening on April 12. To recall some of Olin’s many other credits, she earned an Oscar nomination for her performance in Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story and also co-starred in such films as Romeo is Bleeding, Havana, Night Falls on Manhattan, the Oscar-winning The Reader, and Chocolat and Casanova, both directed by her husband, Lasse Hallstrom. During our conversation Olin will also discuss her newest film with Hallstrom, the biographical drama Hilma, opening at the Royal and Town Center on April 14.

New York Times on WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS? ~ “How Cold War Politics Destroyed One of the Most Popular Bands in America.”

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The Times just published a fascinating feature by rock critic Alan Light about the documentary we’re opening today at the Monica Film Center, with one-night screenings next week at the Laemmle NoHo, Claremont, Town Center and Glendale. (The filmmaker and a member of the band will participate in several Q&As; full schedule here.) The sub head: “A new documentary chronicles the strange, intrigue-filled saga of Blood, Sweat & Tears and its disastrous Eastern Bloc tour in 1970.”

The full piece is worth reading but it begins: “Last year, Rolling Stone compiled a list of “The 50 Worst Decisions in Music History.” Near the top, alongside very high-profile errors in judgment like Decca Records’ rejection of the Beatles, there was a much less familiar episode: the time Blood, Sweat & Tears embarked on an Eastern European concert tour, underwritten by the State Department while the Vietnam War was raging. The reputation of the U.S. government was in tatters for young people, meaning the band looked, as the magazine put it, like “propaganda pawns — which is, more or less, what they were.”

“Now the band members are telling their side of this bizarre story in the new documentary What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears? While everyone involved agrees with Rolling Stone’s conclusion — that the band’s career never recovered from that 1970 tour — the saga turns out to be more complicated than was previously known.

““This isn’t a music doc, it’s a political thriller,” the director John Scheinfeld said in a telephone interview. “It’s about a group of guys who unknowingly walked into this rat’s nest, and how political forces impacted a group of individuals.””

Read the full piece here.