CineVegas Dispatch.

Las Vegas is an unusual place, a city of appetites and rule-breaking where gambling is legal [see comments], but gay marriage is not. CineVegas, with its adventurous program, is an anomaly there, at the Palms Casino, just a few steps from the floor of slot machines. This year marks the festival's tenth anniversary.

What better place than Sin City for a film that takes us inside one of the three bastions of the Axis of Evil? In his mock-umentary, The Juche Idea, Jim Finn constructs a spoof on the official North Korean idolatry of Kim Jong-il that is so convincingly woven into the texture of communist dogmatism that it seems indistinguishable from the official propaganda that comes out of Pyongyang.

Built around a filmed "visit" to a North Korean agricultural site by a Russian journalist - those visits do take place - the film takes the audience through the workers' paradise, cutting in and out of actual North Korean films. The details get crazier and crazier, including a course in "Socialist English," in which a Korean teacher leads an earnest Russian pupil from base to superstructure, including directions to a toilet. Juche, by the way, is loosely translated as self-reliance, in case you didn't know.

All this inanity didn't keep the ardent revolutionaries at WBAI in New York from treating North Korea (which they called the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, or DPRK) with the proper reverence back in the 1980s, when I was on the air there.

There's a cosmology to The Juche Theory, which includes situating Kim Jung Il as the center of the universe. Not that the North Koreans hadn't done that already. Finn incorporates virtuoso parody and buffo elements into his satire - sometimes they are one and the same - but let's not forget that the truth brings in an eerie Dr Strangelove dimension to what otherwise would be as harmless as fantasies like Lost in Space or satires like Galaxy Quest. The same nation that starves its own population (led by a pudgy lover of cinema and fine Scotch) has a space program, or at least a missile program, and it has made those weapons available to countries like Libya, Syria, or Pakistan, which could do serious harm to the world if they decided to.

The same country that has isolated itself from the rest of world in the rigidity of its dynastic communism conducted a real English-language instruction program that involved kidnapping Westerners or luring them to North Korea, and then forcing them to breed Western-looking children, who were to be taught English and sent abroad as spies. It sounds like an idea for a terrible screenplay - or maybe a comedy with potential. The evidence in another documentary, Crossing the Line, by Daniel Gordon, shows that the would-be Manchurian candidates don't learn much, and the results are indeed an unintentional comedy about undercover strategies in the hands of incompetents. (Read about the history of American defectors and life as foreigners in the DPRK in the new memoir, The Reluctant Communist, by Charles Robert Jenkins.) Somehow the notion of incompetents with nuclear weapons in North Korea is not as funny. Bear in mind that the recent firings at the highest level at the US Air Force came after US bombers carrying nuclear weapons were found to have flown over the country for no apparent reason.

Another hybrid of documentary and fiction at CineVegas is Plot Point, a short by the Belgian filmmaker Nicholas Provost. Set in Times Square, where police are deployed en masse, the film is composed entirely of shots taken of people who happen to be on the street. Provost edits the street footage to make it seem as if something explosive is about to happen. His images have a staggering digital precision. Minimal dialogue is dubbed in, but the threatening storm gathers with music that builds dramatically, all ending with a convoy of police cars rolling down 42d Street. If the film has a script, it is the musical score, all borrowed from existing music.

This overture-as-film began as an idea for a documentary, in which Provost planned to ride around with NYPD officers and assemble a film from his footage. The cops themselves agreed to cooperate, but the city administration killed the project, according to Provost in a post-screening discussion at CineVegas. Now, during the festival, he's filming in Vegas, as part of what he calls an observation of happiness. Happiness? Sounds like he and I were at different crap tables.

A sidebar section at CineVegas looked at new Mexican films, four of them. My favorites were Cochochi, by Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán (interview), and Donde Estan Sus Historias? (Where Are Their Stories?) by Nicolas Pereda. (Mike Plante's informative interviews with the filmmakers can be found on the festival website.)

Each of the two films is a journey, each operates at low end of low-budget cinema, and each tells a simple story situated in a specific place that goes far beyond those circumstances. In Cochochi, which has already been on the festival circuit for a while, two young brothers in remote northwestern Mexico leave their town in search of what they think is a stolen horse. The boys, played by two brothers, set out in the way that rural Mexicans tend to travel - on foot, on horseback, or in the back of crowded trucks. The landscape is by turns spectacular and lifelessly banal, as the directors follow the boys in a way that reminds you of The Fast Runner - the logistics are at least as challenging, and these filmmakers make it look seamlessly easy. I won't give the outcome away, but there's no great crescendo. If fantasy is the domain of Guillermo del Toro, fatalism is the domain of films like these.

Donde Estan Sus Historias? follows the long march on foot to Mexico City of a rural young man who is contesting the potential sale of his ailing grandmother's hardscrabble land by a greedy uncle. The future, he is told, is somewhere else than the dirt-poor village where he was born, and that his mother has already abandoned. If this story about a young rural Mexican who struggles to avoid migrating sounds as iconic as a fable, it is. On the way, he stops by the home of a rich family, where his mother works as a maid, absenting herself from her family, as so many Mexicans do, to make a living. The sideshow becomes a story in itself, as the family suspects the young visitor of stealing from them, and the mother is approached by her same distrustful employers to conceive and carry the couple's child, for a fee. It's an odd droit du seigneur, the right of the master to sleep with his servant (usually the right to take a servant's virginity). In this case, the husband seeking to become a father is a large bald American. "You mean, you want me to have sexual relations with Mr Jim?" she asks, incredulously.

In neither film do the characters carry much money or drive cars, or enjoy any of the benefits of globalization. The economies in the rural places that bleed away immigrants to the US and to Mexican cities can barely sustain the populations that remain. You can find many of those who left now working in Las Vegas, which could not survive without the mass migration of gamblers as well as workers. Add these two films to a growing number of stories told from the perspective of the southern side of the border.

Posted by dwhudson at June 18, 2008 6:19 AM