To celebrate the showing of the restoration of Sara Driver’s You Are Not I at the New York Film Festival this Thursday (October 6), here is the chapter of my still-in-print book Film: The Front Line 1983 devoted to Sara, this film in particular. I’m also happy to report that early next year (or thenabouts), Sara’s complete works to date will be released in a long-overdue DVD box set in Canada by Ron Mann’s Sphinx Productions. A video interview I did with her about When Pigs Fly will be one of the extras.– J.R.
SARA MILLER DRIVER
Born in New York, 1955
1979 –- Dream Gone Bad (16mm, b&w, 2 min., silent)
(unavailable)
1980 -– Death in Hoboken (16mm, b&w, 3 min.) (unavailable)
Sir Orpheo (16mm, b&w, 18 min.) (unavailable)
1982 – You Are Not I (16mm, b&w, 48 min.)
If Sara Driver is the youngest filmmaker included in this survey, You Are Not I does not convey that impression. In this respect, it represents a quantum leap from a student exercise like Death in Hoboken, which is the only previous film by Driver that she’s been willing to show me.
A sketchy thriller chase ending in a murder, staged in and around the decrepit atmospherics of Hoboken’s Erie-Lackawanna Railway Terminal, the earlier effort, shot in high-contrast photography, resembles an arty fragment of something like Orson Welles’s The Trial, or, perhaps closer to the mark, Arthur Penn’s Mickey One. Read more
We’re human, unlike the Arabs, says an Israeli soldier in this 2003 documentary. The remark sums up the bias of Western media in covering Baghdad and the West Bank, a bias that makes this an eye-opening experience. Named after United Nations Resolution 181 (which divided Palestine into two states in 1947), the film is a road diary following the two directors, Michel Khleifi of Palestine and Eyal Sivan of Israel, along the resulting boundary; it gets closer to the everyday facts of Arab-Jewish relations in all their complexity than any other documentary I’ve seen. Its three discrete parts — covering the south, the center, and the north — run 84 minutes each and can be seen in any order. (JR) Read more
From the June 24, 2005 Chicago Reader. — J.R.
Me and You and Everyone We Know
*** (A must see)
Directed and Written by Miranda July
With John Hawkes, July, Miles Thompson, Brandon Ratcliff, Carlie Westerman, and Natasha Slayton
Or
*** (A must see)
Directed by Keren Yedaya
Written by Yedaya and Sari Ezouz
With Dana Ivgi, Ronit Elkabetz, Meshar Cohen, Katia Zinbris, and Shmuel Edelman
Samaritan Girl
no stars (Worthless)
Directed and written by Kim Ki-duk
With Kwak Ji-min, Seo Min-jeong, Lee Eol, Hyun-min Kwon, and Young Oh
“Sex is Confusing” could serve as an alternate title to these three movies, all high-profile film festival prizewinners. The first is an American woman’s debut feature, the second an Israeli woman’s first feature, and the third is Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s tenth.
Miranda July’s account of the inspiration for Me and You and Everyone We Know gives an indication of her wistful comedy’s strengths and limitations. “This movie was inspired by the longing I carried around as a child, longing for the future, for someone to find me, for magic to descend upon my life and transform everything,” she writes in the press packet. “It was also informed by how this longing progressed as I became an adult, slightly more fearful, more contorted, but no less fantastically hopeful.” Read more
