Portland’s late-summer screenings feel especially thoughtful, turbulent, and aliiiive! This month, we’ve got fresh restorations and poetic takes on youth, class, and artistic longing on the docket. A coming-of-age sparkler by Japanese director Shinji Sōmai gets its due, and two vérité documentaries paint radically human portraits of small-town America. Plus, Ethan Hawke has a well-deserved spiritual crisis. Let’s get into it.
Moving
For fans of Isao Takahata’s Only Yesterday (1991), Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters (2018), Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s A Summer at Grandpa's (1984).
Portland State University’s student-run 5th Avenue Cinema offers up a solid slate of programming this month, from French New Wave director Jacque Rivette’s surreal curiosity Le Pont du Nord on August 15–17 to Lingui, The Sacred Bonds, which follows a Chadian single mother seeking an abortion for her teenage daughter, on August 29–31. Smaller art house cinemas have been reaping the benefits of indie film distributor Cinema Guild’s 4K restorations of several films by Japanese director Shinji Sōmai. We have the chance to see Sōmai’s rite-of-passage work Moving (1993) at screenings on August 8–10. Although he’s relatively unknown in the US, Sōmai’s style of ultra-long takes, natural lighting, and his tender instinct toward adolescent emotions have drawn admiration from many Japanese directors—Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Hirokazu Kore-eda among them.
Moving tracks the tornadic Renko, a sixth-grader struggling with her parent’s divorce. Steered by Renko’s unruly emotional landscape, Sōmai grants voice and space to a character who might have otherwise gone unnoticed in favor of grown-up angst. As dusk falls over Lake Biwa in the film’s final 30 minutes, a festival ignites, fire and water converging as a dragon boat burns. It’s a powerful visual metaphor symbolizing the merge of Renko’s childhood and future selves.
If the film leaves you craving more of Sōmai’s tender atmospheres, then boy are you in luck. Clinton Street Theater will screen Sōmai’s The Friends on August 23 and Typhoon Club on August 26 as part of its Hanabi Film Festival. This is rare. Don’t pass it up. (5th Avenue Cinema, 510 SW Hall, August 8–10, various times, $0–$7, not rated, more info)
Seventeen with Kelly Reichardt
For fans of Fredrick Wiseman's High School (1968), Albert and David Maysles’ Salesman (1969), Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County, USA (1976).
This screening of Joel DeMott and Jeff Kreines’ Seventeen (1983)—which Kelly Reichardt will introduce—doubles as a celebration of life for the recently passed documentarian DeMott, whose “vérité without voyeurism” approach meant hanging out with her subjects, skipping zooms and cutaways, and capturing life as the eye naturally sees it. Originally commissioned for PBS’ Middletown series, the network deemed Seventeen too controversial for broadcast, but it later snagged the Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at Sundance in 1985. The doc follows a group of working-class seniors at a Muncie, Indiana high school, where Midwestern teen ennui and class tensions mingle with rampant racism.
This screening sold out quickly, but Kreines advises that you check out the full, uncensored film for free at realseventeenmovie.com. (Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy, Wed August 13, 7 pm, sold out, not rated)
The Crazy Family
For fans of Gregg Araki, Todd Solondz, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Dogtooth (2009).
Gakuryū "Sogo" Ishii is best known for helping develop the cyberpunk aesthetic in Japan, but he’s directed everything from moody, folkloric indies to madhouse satire pieces that are difficult to look away from. My favorite of Ishii’s is August in the Water (1995), which features a mysterious meteorite, a magical high school girl, and a character who analyses horoscopes via an ancient computer. But The Crazy Family, which predates August by over a decade, sets the stage for much of Ishii’s singular visual language and offers some interesting commentary on class status and the preservation of self-image. In the film, a nuclear family moves into their dream home, but the pressures of suburban existence quickly mutate their domestic bliss into unhinged anarchy. The Crazy Family was a clear influence on Takashi Miike (The Happiness of the Katakuris), and if you can handle some punk-inflected maximalism, you’ll connect with it.
Newly restored from Ishii’s original negatives, the film will screen as part of Clinton Street Theater’s third annual Hanabi Film Festival. The fest runs from August 18–31 and includes other screenings I’m so ready for, like Hiroshi Teshigahara’s elemental thriller Woman in the Dunes (1964) and Tokuzō Tanaka’s Kwaidan-adapted folk horror The Snow Woman (1968). (Clinton Street Theater, 2522 SE Clinton, Tues August 19, 7 pm, $10, not rated, more info)
First Reformed
For fans of self-flagellation, auteurism, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light (1963).
Paul Schrader is at best a polarizing figure and at worst a director whose legacy is shadowed by a recent sexual assault allegation. (Why do so many directors require caveats such as these?) His films tend to hit (Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters) or miss (The Canyons)—critic Dom Sinacola correctly labeled Schrader’s 1979 Hardcore as the “Grand Guignol of white guy shame.” However, at his best, the Calvinist-raised filmmaker’s works are dark and exacting, clinging to universal questions of morality and penance. They’re heavy. (Schrader’s legendary 2016 Facebook status update, “I enter unwashed into a world that disrespects me and despises my values,” could double as a tagline for many of his films.)
First Reformed (2017) is a prescient example of this spiritual weight. It’s about G-O-D, climate change, capitalism, and mortality, among other fundamental crises of modern human experience. (Schrader argues that it’s actually about none of these things, but rather an “evolution of the soul,” which… fine.) Ethan Hawke stars as Ernst, an upstate New York pastor in an existential spiral triggered by a pregnant churchgoer (Amanda Seyfried) and a radical environmentalist. The answer? Violence, maybe—or maybe not! You’ll see why. The film is the first in Schrader’s sparse, isolating “Man in a Room” trilogy, followed by The Card Counter (2021) and Master Gardener (2022). (Hollywood Theatre, 4122 NE Sandy, Sun August 24, 7 pm, $5–12, R, more info)
American Movie
For fans of Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams (1982), Joel DeMott’s Demon Lover Diary (1980), Joe Pera Talks With You.
In the documentary American Movie (1999), noted Cheesehead Mark Borchardt wrestles with an artist’s question: How does one become a successful film director when they live with their parents in small-town Menomonee Falls, deliver newspapers for a living, and owe child support? Borchardt is a lot of things—mulleted, mercurial, often drunk—but his obsessive devotion to Coven, the short horror film that he pronounces with a long “o,” is endearing.
Chris Smith, now known for Netflix docs like Fyre and Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond, launched his career by capturing Borchardt’s rambling ambitions in American Movie. The film trails Borchardt as he yo-yos between half-formed production ideas, wrangles funding for Coven from his reluctant family, assembles an inept film crew, and somehow completes Coven just before its premiere at a Milwaukee theater. It’s deeply funny, but never mean-spirited. If you’ve ever been a little too obsessed with your own passion project, you will recognize yourself in it. (PAM CUT’s Tomorrow Theater, 3530 SE Division, Sun August 31, 7 pm, $15, R, more info)
For more screenings, check out the film listings at EverOut.
