Fests and events, 2/28.

Red Shift Festival, opening tonight at the Pioneer in New York and running through Friday, celebrates "the full spectrum of nomadic, travel and immigrant experiences from filmmakers working outside of their country of origin," notes Elena Marinaccio at the Reeler. Among the highlights is the US premiere of A Journey of Dmitry Shostakovich.

Also opening tonight is the One World Human Rights Documentary Festival in Prague; it runs through March 8. Via Amy King.

"Signs of Empire is a movie by other means, a 'narrative with stills,' a tape/slide presentation using archival images and sound," writes Adrian Searle in the Guardian. "Half an hour long, Signs of Empire (the title a neat twist on Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs) remains disturbing, almost a quarter of a century after it was made. There is something lulling and hypnotic in the rhythmic procession of images, while the soundtrack is a countersurge of accumulating dread."

Jacques Rivette's Out 1: Noli Me Tangere is returning to the Museum of the Moving Image this weekend. "A successful marathon creates a trance state as well as a sense of being one of the elect," writes J Hoberman, thinking back to November's engagement. "But even among marathons, Out 1 is extraordinary... This crowd came ready to work. In addition to sandwiches, spectators brought source materials... [W]ork we did."

Also in the Voice: Scott Foundas on the BAM retrospective, Pimps, Prostitutes and Pigs: Shohei Imamura's Japan: "The work of a social anthropologist with an unapologetic Darwinian streak, these are movies in which modern Japan is but a simulacrum of its feudal past, and where the epochs separating civilized man from his animal forefathers are routinely collapsed in a heartbeat." More from Eric Kohn in the New York Press.

And Ed Halter: "This week, the Museum of Modern Art hosts retrospectives of two visionaries whose sensibilities couldn't be further removed: Austrian guerrilla girl Valie Export and Iran's celebrated humanist auteur, Abbas Kiarostami."

Just added to the SXSW lineup:

• Mike Binder's Reign Over Me.
• Steven Cantor's James Blunt: Return to Kosovo.
• "A Conversation with Elizabeth Avellan," producer.

The Wind That Shakes the Barley at the San Francisco Irish Film Festival, Buster Keaton at the Balboa... SF360 rounds up this week's events in the Bay Area. And Brian Darr lists dozens and dozens more.

"This February's Film Comments Selects series proved to be, for me, 5-for-5," writes Zach Campbell. "No bad films." Notes follow.

And then there's Acquarello on "Valeska Grisebach's slender, yet meticulously observed slice of life portrait, Longing," and "Mamoru Oshii's deliriously off-kilter, rapid fire superlivemation animation feature, Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters." Also: "Evoking the moral tales of Eric Rohmer in its understated, yet perceptive conversational approach to the inconstant rationalizations and (over) intellectualizations that seek to reconcile (or at least self-justify) the mysteries of the human heart, [Summer 04] is an acutely observed exposition on the amorphous terrain of human attraction, fidelity, guilt, and longing."

David Lamelas: at Monika Sprüth Philomene Magers in Munich through March 24.

The film that's got David Byrne thinking about performance as catharsis is probably Seven Easy Pieces by Marina Abramovic.

The AFI Dallas schedule is up; the fest runs March 22 through April 1. Via The Proper Care & Feeding of an American Messiah director Chris Hansen.

Posted by dwhudson at February 28, 2007 2:10 PM