Today I’ll discuss my favorite film at Sundance… so far. But first:

As I mentioned last week, this year’s pilgrimage to the Sundance Film Festival was preceded by three days of round table discussions and seminars tailor-made for our nation’s Art House theaters. Upon landing in Salt Lake City I went straight to the Peery Hotel where everyone gathered, introductions were made, and then we sat down at tables for food and drink. The first special guest to take the podium was Sundance Director of Festival Programming and Creative Development, John Cooper. His speech to us was off-the-cuff, frank, humorous, and inspirational. Personally, my biggest inspiration came from knowing that he was taking time to be with us at the height of the craziness that is Sundance.

Topics covered by the Art House Convergence included: “How to Survive the Economic Downturn,” “Industry Update on Current Technology,” The Not-For-Profit Model and Proven Fund Raising Methods,” “New World Distribution – The Future of Art House Exhibition” (featuring Connie White, Bob Berney, Ted Hope, and Peter Broderick), “Aligning Education with a Programming Mission for the Art House,” and a “Conference Wrap-Up” (with a Keynote Address by Ted Hope and closing remarks by Russ Collins – who deserves kudos as chief organizer of this event). Ted Hope has produced over 50 films, including some of my favorite Hal Hartley films (not to mention Safe and Happiness), and his keynote address can be found at: http://trulyfreefilm.blogspot.com/

The conference brought a lot of invaluable information my way, including cheap options for online ticketing sales, fundraising ideas, and also excellent models for educational outreach. The latter was made clear by the presentation put forth by Emily Keating from the Jacob Burns Film Center. She showed us an excerpt from a documentary made by high school students who traveled to Africa to interview kids who’d lost their families. One shot showed a kid, who looked to be ten-years-old, who had been forced to kill his own father and was now left to pick up the pieces and take care of his surviving family. Call it synchronicity, be the very next day at Sundance the movie that blew everything else I’d seen so far touched on exactly that same subject.

Johnny Mad Dog

This is a powerful and harrowing look at the despicable cycle of violence that involves child soldiers. While most people will probably compare this film to City of God (due to the violent subject matter involving impoverished kids in underdeveloped nations), I couldn’t help but feel that this powerful work was a merger of Herzogian poetic aesthetics (visceral, unpredictable, instinctual) with certain Kubrickian themes that explore how people are made into killers (ie: Full Metal Jacket), not to mention the surreal world that is created by murdering and rapist youth parading around in strange costumes (ie: Clockwork Orange). Other cinematic touchstones that are evoked at times would be Suburbia and The Road Warrior. But make no mistake: Johnny Mad Dog has a tumultuous style all its own that, aesthetically, is as far away from the clean and symmetrical approach used by Kubrick as is possible. I’ve derided the herky-jerky camera aesthetic now favored by many young filmmakers to bully viewers into a cheap sensation of constant action. Most people handle it badly, induce motion sickness, and cheat the eye from gathering details. But here it works, and works gangbusters. I never got motion sickness, I felt I could see everything clearly, and the cinematography had me fully immersed in its unusual settings, splintered by chaos, rattled by chanting, and jostled by the blood-frenzied immediacy of its subject matter. After a handful of tepid films here it was; something stunning that once again reminded me of the power a well-crafted film can still wield.

The setting is a civil war in an unnamed African nation (it was shot in Liberia). Many of the actors are one-time Liberian child soldiers who here recreated their ritualized descent into barbarism and added authenticity to proceedings that are exponentially worse than anything William Golding predicted in his 1954 book, Lord of the Flies.

While attending an Art House Convergence mixer sponsored by IFP/Filmmaker Magazine, I ran into the director (Jean-Stephane Suavaire) – this was three hours before screening his film. I approached him to chat only because I knew he’d worked with Gaspar Noe, and I had some funny war stories to share about both watching and screening Noe’s films at my film series. From this brief conversation with Suavaire I found out he’d clothed, fed, and worked with the kids he used for Johnny Mad Dog for the full year it took to make the film, and that one of the upsides to the production was in seeing these kids take to acting as a craft full of options and alternatives for the lifestyle they once led .

I wish I’d seen the film before running into him, because now I have many more questions. My screening was late in the night, and poorly attended. But the next day I ran into Toby Leonard from the Belcourt Theatre, and he introduced me to Adam Yauch (aka: MCA from the Beastie Boys), a founding member of Oscilloscope Pictures, a new upstart distributor that handles such films as Wendy and Lucy as well as Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. We shook hands and I told him about the best film I’d seen so far: Johnny Mad Dog. It seemed to illicit enough interest from him that he made it a point to pencil in a screening. I’m crossing my fingers that he sees it, picks it up, and gives it a home – especially since Oscilloscope Pictures is one those cool and exhibitor-friendly upstarts that make it easy for a small venue like me to share their films with my audience. If Sony Pictures Classics picks it up, I’m screwed.

Relevant links:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hQP1A7hcM-OSvmzvfmtVAETvh1_g

http://www.facebook.com/ext/share.php?sid=56762427651&h=rBLyN&u=xXshQ

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ishmael_Beah

http://belcourttheatre.blogspot.com/