Nine days, four directors, three countries, one school.
Over the past week, Duke has been a veritable UN of features, playing host to two film series and a festival, all of which feature screenings from around the world and intimate discussions with many of the films' directors.
It kicked off Monday when Duke went French with Quebec Week, a series of six films. Tomorrow begins a pair of screenings that take the school south for the 19th annual Latin American Film Festival, and it all ends Monday night with a screening of the appropriately-titled I Love Cinema, an Egyptian film that is part of the No Visa Required series currently touring the country.
While students may see this as escapist fare, by their own admission, the filmmakers' purpose in showing their films is as much about changing expectations as it is entertainment.
"The films are meant to show a picture of Colombia, a country with problems, but [that] is much more than the drugs and war that are usually depicted with it," says director Luis Ospina, whose two entries in the Latin American Film Festival run the gamut from documentary to noir. Ospina will be at Duke Saturday night to discuss the latter of these efforts, Breath of Life, which he claims is "the first ever Colombian noir."
Our neighbors to the north explored similar territory. A highlight of Quebec Week was Denis Chouinard's L'Ange de goudronb (Tar Angel), which screened Wednesday afternoon in Griffith Theatre. The film takes a harsh look at the state of immigration in Canada. "People in Canada have this image that everyone who comes to Canada is accepted- [but] we have our own little sh-- in the backyard that we don't want to look at," Chouinard says.
If this sounds a bit like America, it should. Chouinard goes out of his way to point out that the political message he furthers in his film can be applied globally ("It's the same everywhere") and that part of his intent as a filmmaker was to promote action against this reality. This particularly applies to young people.
"The age people rebel is in the 18-to-25 group. The time you are in school and have ideas about how to change the world," says Chouinard of his trips around the university circuit. Although Duke, a school with a sometimes-reputation for a student body fed with a silver spoon, doesn't seem the most likely candidate, the director adopts a different vantage point. "People who study in such a university as Duke will be in power," he notes.
One wonders, however, how much truth there is to this reason. By Chouinard's own admission, there are few options for foreign directors looking to screen their films in America. "America is a vault. It's impossible to get your films screened here except for the big cities and the university circuit," he says.
Whatever the reasons the directors choose to cameo on campus, the significant improvements to the Screen/Society program in recent years can't be denied. "It used to be that the University didn't know about Screen/Society, but they have been supportive. [Now], there is more awareness, and appreciation for the breadth of programming around," says Hank Okasaki, exhibitions director for Film/Video/Digital. But, what happens when you build it and still no one comes? L'Ange de goudronb may have won the Public Award at the prestigious Brisbane International Film Festival, but it didn't win any accolades at Duke. Wednesday afternoon's screening drew no more than 50 people.
Oussama Fawzi, who will be in attendance Monday night to discuss his film I Love Cinema, must have similar concerns. Last month The Prince, the first installment of the No Visa Reqiured series, played to a crowd numbering in the 20s, many of whom were required to be there as part of their FOCUS program. Annie Leahy, program director of the Tribeca Film Institute, which co-sponsors the series, states that Duke was specifically chosen as a site for the series because of its continued investment in Middle Eastern cinema. Yet, how long will she, and other organizers for that matter, continue to come to Duke if the audience fails to materialize?
Okasaki, for one, isn't concerned. "It takes time to build some literacy about international cinema," he says. "What you do get are people who come for films- and they may bring their friends and increase awareness, and they appreciate the experience and the event a lot more than the normal Hollywood screening."
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