PMA Films: A delightful South Korean comedy about the impulse to create art
PMA Films Specialist Chris Gray dives into our upcoming screenings for November 11-20
The Novelist’s Film
Hong Sang-soo is quietly the most productive major filmmaker in the world. This year was not the first time Hong had more than one feature in the Main Slate of the New York Film Festival, and it wasn’t the second time, either. The director’s productivity, and his remarkable consistency, are a credit to his methods: small stories made with small crews and an embrace of chance and happenstance. His abundant filmography (he’s made 25 films in this century alone) is a catalog of chance encounters and gentle experiments in structure that are reminiscent of great French filmmakers like Eric Rohmer. Hong’s latest, The Novelist’s Film, is a perfect entry point into his substantial body of work. It’s a simple, black-and-white film about a middle-aged novelist (Lee Hye-young) who has grown tired of her craft and decides, after running into a famous actress (Kim Min-hee) in a park, that she wants to write a movie. Nested in this prickly but exceedingly charming story are a set of rich and plainly autobiographical observations from a middle-aged auteur wondering if he’s stuck in a creative rut. To be clear, he’s not, and The Novelist’s Film, which feels at once perfectly concise and yet somehow elusive, may be my favorite film of his since 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then.
Screening Times & Tickets:
The Salt of the Earth
The Salt of the Earth is a 2014 documentary co-directed by the great Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire; Paris, Texas) and Juliano Ribeiro Saldago, the son of photographer Sebastião Salgado, who is commemorated in this gorgeous feature.
All That Breathes
An eye-opening portrait of present-day New Delhi and a deeply moving portrait of two brothers dedicated to caring for the black kites that are increasingly threatened as they fly over a restive city beset by poor air quality, All That Breathes is the first documentary to win top honors at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festivals. Directed by Shaunak Sen (and filmed with an incredible eye by Ben Bernhard, Riju Das, and Saumyananda Sahi), the film eloquently ties the story of a fledgling family business (the brothers’ tiny, grant-funded animal hospital) to the immediate threat of climate change and the equally drastic outbreak of anti-Muslim violence throughout India. The black kite is the most common type of hawk, and their annual arrival in Delhi is cause for both alarm (in an amazing scene, one of the brothers gets his glasses stolen right off his face) and amazement. But the birds are falling from the sky at an alarming rate, a likely consequence of the city’s heavy pollution and climate-induced air quality issues, and the brothers must balance two prerogatives: to care for the birds and for their families. Sen evokes this conflict through eloquent suggestion and tender portraiture, but what really stuns about All That Breathes is its imagery of a city beset by both drastic heat and torrential rains as wildlife teems in and around it.
Screening Times & Tickets:
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
A deceptively featherweight comedy that tweaks cinema’s “male gaze,” Howard Hawks’s 1953 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes boasts one of the greatest performances by Marilyn Monroe, captured in our current exhibition Presence by Richard Avedon.