News

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Neïl Beloufa's Occidental (2017) is showing January 10 – February 8, 2019 exclusively on Mubi.In the age of globalization, French-Algerian visual artist Neïl Beloufa addresses the slippery slope of human interaction, empathy, and prejudice, cloaked in kitsch 1970s hotel environment. Shot entirely at his own studio south of Paris, Occidental is his second feature film, yet Beloufa’s career is prolific with mixed media installations and docu-fiction short films. By setting the time and tone of the film fifty years in the past, the artist makes a clear commentary on the contemporary state of exception, exemplified by protests, suspicions, homophobia, and racism—all of it glazed in vivid reds, greens, and pink, soaked in a moody score. Occidental is both a critical nod and a tribute to an imagined, capitalized, pseudo-tolerant, Wicked West. The film is centered around the Parisian hotel Occidental,...

French-Algerian visual artist and filmmaker Neïl Beloufa’s second feature, Occidental, opens in media res as its eponymous setting, the tawdry Hotel Occidental, is going up in flames. Its exterior is beset by clashing police and protesters while a man is vexedly trapped inside one of the inn’s rooms, seemingly more annoyed than distraught despite his presently dire situation. This familiar setup suggests that, by the time the film catches up with this scene, the chain of events that preceded it will have provided some clarity or context for the sequence and lead to a fuller understanding of how and why things wound up this way. But as the subsequent opening credits, set against images of the lethargic, largely anonymous protest that led to the ensuing riots, imply with their dual-layered text (tinted by retro pastels scattered haphazardly around the frame), this will not be the case. Beloufa aims...

Leviathan directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's latest, Caniba, will screen in the 55th New York Film Festival Projections program Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has announced the 55th New York Film Festival Projections selections, which run from October 6 to October 9. The programme will screen eight feature films, including Kevin Jerome Everson's Tonsler Park, Neïl Beloufa's Occidental, Narimane Mari's Le Fort Des Fous, Rosalind Nashashibi's Vivian’s Garden, Xu Bing's Dragonfly Eyes, Luke Fowler's Electro-Pythagoras (A Portrait Of Martin Bartlett), Ben Russell's Good Luck, and Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor's Caniba. Zhou Tao's 48-minute The Worldly Cave will be shown on loop at the Elinor Bunin Munroe Amphitheater over the four days of Projections. There will also be eight programs of shorts and the newly restored work of Barbara Hammer and Mike Henderson preserved by the Academy Film Archive.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center has the complete lineup for its Projections section of the 55th New York Film Festival, which will unspool October 6 – 9. The year’s slate is comprised of eight features and eight shorts programs, each designed to present “an international selection of film and video work that expands upon our notions of what the moving image can do and be.” Each year, the Projections section of the festival seeks out innovative new films told in unique and often experimental new ways, and 2017 seems to be no different.

“Projections is the New York Film Festival’s home for adventurous work, and our 2017 lineup attests to the sheer number and variety of ways in which our most vital artists are exploring the possibilities of cinematic language,” said Dennis Lim, Fslc Director of Programming and one of the curators of Projections. “We’ve extended the program by a day this year,...

Occidental. © Bad MANNERSHas there ever been a film in which members of an upper class family get together—for a meal, an anniversary, a vacation, anything—and, like, have a pleasant time? That’s certainly not the case in Oren Moverman’s Competition entry The Dinner, which is based on the best-selling novel by Dutch author Herman Koch and joins the long tradition of films wherein a family gathering brings decades’ worth of pent-up resentments to the surface, precipitating an eruption of histrionics. The family in question, made up entirely of self-regarding, immoral monsters, are the Lohmans: estranged brothers Stan and Paul and their respective wives Claire and Katelyn, who go out for dinner at one of those ludicrously fancy restaurants where the waiter gives you a five-minute recital as prelude to each of the half dozen courses. The reason for their meeting, not fully given away until the final reel,...