Author Archives: basiltsiokos

Coming to PBS’s POV tonight, Monday, August 6:
STILL TOMORROW

Director:
Jian Fan

Premiere:
IDFA 2016

Select Festivals:
True/False, Full Frame, Sheffield, AFI Docs, Belfast, Shanghai

About:
An unassuming Chinese woman contends with unexpected fame as a poet.

After her intimate poem, “Crossing Half of China to Sleep with You,” spread virally through Chinese social media, Yu Xiuhua became a sensation. Dubbed the “Emily Dickinson of China,” Yu captivated audiences with her backstory – a middle-aged, minimally educated woman farmer in rural Hubei province, living with cerebral palsy. In addition to spotlighting the impact of her newfound public voice, Fan’s film captures the mundane aspects of Yu’s life at home with her elderly parents, tending to daily chores, while she also reflects on a deep-seated loneliness and dissatisfaction stemming from a loveless, arranged marriage to Yin, who is frequently away from home working construction. While Yin is clearly greedy, and has caused Yu decades of unhappiness, her frequent screaming complaints and demands for a divorce grow repetitive and also serve to paint her in an unflattering light. This martial strife clearly informs her poetry of longing and serves as a stark contrast to the sensitivity of her writing, presented here in voiceover and text cards which, while bordering on the pretentious, underscores the escape and creative outlet it provides her.

Courtesy of the filmmakers

Director:
Lee Aronsohn

Premiere:
Woodstock 2017

Select Festivals:
Napa Valley, Biografilm, Florida, Newport Beach, Boulder

About:
The filmmaker sets out to find his favorite band from his college years.

Attending the University of Colorado at Boulder in the early 1970s, Aronson became a fan of a popular local band named Magic Music. Decades later, having relocated to California and found success as a television writer and producer – including, most recently TWO AND A HALF MEN and THE BIG BANG THEORY – he wondered whatever happened his favorite musicians. Though faced with multiple hurdles – Magic Music never recorded an album, they never had any real exposure outside of Colorado, there’s not much footage of their performances, and they broke up in 1975 with some bad blood between some bandmates – Aronson is determined to bring them back together for a reunion concert. Given the personal quest aspect of his film, it’s somewhat justified that the director appears on camera, but it remains a clunky, overly personal device that distracts from the more universal ideas of nostalgia and second chances that allow this project to transcend the fact that Magic Music won’t mean anything to the vast majority of viewers.

Coming to theatres today, Wednesday, August 1:
CALLING ALL EARTHLINGS

Director:
Jonathan Berman

Premiere:
Illuminate 2018

Select Festivals:
Maui

About:
The mysterious story of a man who claimed to talk to aliens and those who try to preserve his legacy.

In 1953, George Van Tassel, an aviation engineer who had worked for Howard Hughes, purportedly encountered an alien who shared plans for a device to generate unlimited energy and work scientific miracles. Van Tassel constructed the Integraton, a flying saucer-shaped building in the desert, but died unexpectedly just before it was to be activated. This, of course, fueled conspiracy theories that he was assassinated by dark forces that didn’t want him to share his secrets with the world. However, as shown in Berman’s very loosely constructed film, Van Tassel has amassed his share of acolytes, many seemingly more eccentric than the inventor himself. Some share stories about the man, others have taken over the stewardship of the remains of the Integraton (after much of its inner workings were stripped by vandals), while still others maintain the most tenuous connections to the subject. While there’s some intriguing history here, its presentation is all over the place, stopped and started in favor of introducing more and more figures who are often barely provided the space to be developed fully, resulting in a fairly messy, and not particularly satisfying, surface exploration of what could have been an out of this world topic.