Fests and events, 6/1.

"The ostensible context for bringing together the more than 40 Vietnam films in the Harvard Film Archive's nearly month-long series At Home and Abroad: The Vietnam War on Film is the May 30 reissue on DVD of the Winterfilm Collective's painful yet cathartic 1972 exploration of the My Lai massacre, Winter Soldier," writes Matt Ashare in the Boston Phoenix. "But it's hard to ignore that giant elephant in the corner of the room - namely, the increasingly discouraging situation in Iraq, which, on so many levels, seems to resemble what this country went through in Southeast Asia."

If you've seen Xan Cassavetes's Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession, you already know you want to see Overlord. Well, Ray Pride's got a review, plus news that it'll screen in Chicago June 2 through 8 before going national "in the months to come."

A sudden flurry of "Live! In Person!" news:

• Hou Hsiao-hsien will be on hand via a live video hookup tomorrow evening at the IFC Center in NYC in conjunction with a screening of Three Times.

• Not only will Sara Karloff, daughter of Boris, present "rare home movies, seldom screened clips, TV shows, trailers and a full evening of surprises" at the Balboa Theater in San Francisco tomorrow, but screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga, who wrote Alejandro González Iñárritu's Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and of course, Cannes competitor Babel, will be at the Balboa on Thursday, June 8, to introduce a screening of The Three Burials of Melquidaes Estrada.

• That's the day SFIndie's Another Hole in the Head festival begins, and the filmmakers behind Room 6, Dark Remains, The Call of Cthulhu, The Hamiltons, Ghost of Mae Nak, The Last Eve, Blood Deep, The Slaughter, The Gravedancers, Defenceless: A Blood Symphon, The Lost and Starslyderz all plan to be present at some point.

The Brooklyn Independent Cinema Series expands this summer to the first and third Monday of each month.

The scaling down of Indieforum, Darcy Paquet's favorite festival in Seoul, is indicative of what's happening Korean independent film in general, he explains.

At the site for the New York Asian Film Festival, Kevin B Lee and Michael Kerpan have a terrific little piece up, "We Love Bae Doo-na (even if Korea doesn't)."

In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Crust whiplashes from a review of the Iranian drama Border Café to a preview of the Recent Spanish Cinema series (June 1 through 4). A bit more from Mark Olson in the LA Weekly.

"The best way to approach Lincoln Center's [Open Roads: New Italian Cinema] is to pace it with recent DVD releases that are in themselves grand occasions," suggests Armond White in the New York Press. E.g., The Passenger and Fists in the Pocket.

A note from Shawn Badgley in the Austin Chronicle alerts local readers to De/Re:Constructing the Narrative: Global Experiments in Film, running Tuesdays, June 6 through July 25.

Posted by dwhudson at June 1, 2006 1:02 PM