AEC Independent Film Series will begin next week end at the Bijou Theatre
downtown.  The following is brochure copy for the films in the series.


February 1-7
OTOMO
Director: Frieder Schlaich
German with English Subtitles
Based in part, on true events that happened one day, during 1989, to a man
named Otomo in Stuttgart, Germany. He was stopped on a bridge by police for
questioning,
and ended up killing two officers and wounding three others before being
shot to death himself. Earlier that day, he was confronted on a streetcar by
a racist ticket inspector and as the situation escalated, he head butted him
and fled which sets up a manhunt that ends on the bridge. What happened
between these two incidents is not known, so the director tried to imagine
what went through Otomo's mind that day. Otomo's story sparked a national
debate in West Germany about institutional bigotry and the country's
immigration laws. You may remember Isaach De Bankole (Otomo) in the film
Ghost Dog as the French speaking African friend.

February 8-14
va savoir (Who Knows?)
Director: Jacques Rivette
French with English Subtitles
From the French New Wave pioneer director of
La Belle Noiseuse, we see a film that focuses on six main characters (three
men and three women) and who find themselves entangled in each others lives
during production of a play during a brief run in Paris. It is a romantic
comedy that sometimes turns into slapstick. There is the French actress,
Camille, who is starring in the play and Ugo, her Italian lover is the
director and co-star in the same play; Pierre, her ex-boyfriend who is a
philosophy professor, whom she hasn't seen in three years; Sonia, his wife,
is a dancer; there's a beautiful graduate student named Do and Arthur, her
gambling half-brother. Once they are all meet, the complications begin. This
film was nominated for the Golden Palm at this past Cannes Film Festival and
has received numerous other awards.

February 15-21
AMÉLIE
Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
French with English Subtitles
A lighthearted, whimsical fantasy film about a shy, lonely waitress in Paris
who decides to make her life's work by coming up with elaborate schemes
straightening other people's lives to make them happy. It all begins when
she finds a small box of childhood treasures behind a wall in her apartment
and anonymously returns it to its rightful owner. She inspires an artist,
avenges a victim of a bully, convinces her father to take his very first
vacation and many other things, but the question is, can she do for herself,
what she does for others to be happy? This film is already a major hit in
France and has won numerous awards in many festivals. In the past, the film
series has shown several other films by the same director, such as The City
of Lost Children and Delicatessen.

February 22-28
IN THE BEDROOM
Director: Todd Field
USA
Described by the New York Times' Stephen Holden as "perfectly observed,
wrenchingly acted," this drama centers on a middle-class New England
couple struggling with the murder of their son. First-time director Todd
Field works from an Andre Dubus story with devastating effect, capturing the
contrast of placid, middle-class gentility and the depths of human emotion
that reveal themselves in the wake of fateful events. Sissy Spacek, a heavy
favorite for Oscar nomination in her portrayal as mother of the murdered
son, leads an exceptional cast, including Tom Wilkonson (father) and the
surprising Marisa Tomei as the son's older girlfriend. Field's eye for
realism and a quiet moment is unwavering.

March 1-7
THE SHIPPING NEWS
Director: Lasse Hallstrom
USA
A struggling newspaper writer, Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) returns to his family's
longtime home, a small fishing town in Newfoundland, with his young
daughter, after a
traumatizing experience with her mother, Petal, who sold her to an illegal
adoption agency. Though Quoyle has had little success thus far in life, his
shipping news column, "The Gammy Bird," finds an audience, and his
experiences in the town change his life. Then he meets the widow Wavey...
Lasse Hallstrom's screen adaptation of E. Annie Proulx's popular novel
features dramatic panoramas of the severe, rugged seacoast of northeastern
Canada.

March 8-14
THE DEVIL'S BACKBONE
Director: Guillermo Del Toro
Spanish with English Subtitles
Director Guillermo del Toro transports us to his own universe of childhood
fears and surrealistic imagery. Set primarily in an orphanage amidst
the Spanish Civil War, the movie focuses on the lives of the teachers and
children hiding from a war they've lost, and from the people who'd
like to kill them. But inside the orphanage, a mysterious character not of
this world reveals itself... The Devil's Backbone is enriched by the
contrast between the clammy, greenish light that infuses the orphanage by
night, and the parched orange glow of daytime, a tonal contrast mirrored by
the story's melding of horror and melodrama. You may remember seeing the
film Cronos in a previous AEC film series by the same director.

March 15-21
NO MAN'S LAND
Director: Danis Tanovic
Bosnian with English Subtitles
Ever wonder how normal people get to see all
those foreign films nominated for awards at the Golden Globes and Oscars?
Well, this is how!  No Man's Land was voted Best Foreign Language Film by
the Golden Globes, has
won the same award from the Los Angeles Film Critics, and will most likely
be nominated come Oscar time. Described as a"French-Belgian-Italian-Slovenian
coproduction", this film considers what it
would be like to have two Bosnia soldiers trapped circumstantially with a
Serb adversary. To add to the absurdity, one of the soldiers is lying on top
of a land mine that will explode if he moves. Called "curiously beautiful",
"scathing", and "fierce, funny and finally devastating", director Damis
Tanovic's script also won Best Screenplay at Cannes this past summer. "You
won't forget No Man's Land - it stings."

March 22-28
LA CIENAGA (The Swamp)
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Spanish with
English Subtitles
Called "a fascinating fly-on-the-wall experience", this film from Argentina
is translated as "the swamp". This word seems to describe the dire situation
these people find themselves in. Staying in a crumbling vacation house, two
families "who were once richŠnow squat in the ruins of their own lives."
Particularly noted is director Lucrecia Martel's work with the children in
the cast: "When the kids are on screen, La Cienaga seems closer to
documentary than fiction, as tumultuous, tender, and horrifying as real life
caught on the fly."

March 29-April 4
LANTANA
Director: Ray Lawrence
Australia
Winner of seven Australian Film Institute awards and nominated for six, Lantana
features several actors well known here in America: Tony winner Anthony
LaPaglia, Oscar winner Geoffrey Rush, and Cannes Film Festival Award winner
Barbara Hershey. Called "a hothouse thriller of tangled sexuality", the
story features four couples whose lives are linked together by a woman's
murder. The acting is said to be "top-notch", while LaPaglia, playing the
cop who is working on the murder case, is particularly cited for giving "the
performance of his career". Lantana has also been called director Ray
Lawrence's "Aussie rendition of Short Cuts" (by Robert Altman), and its
"chance-impelled multi-strand narrativeŠpremised on the possibility of (and
yearning for) connection" compared to Magnolia.

April 5-11
Cure
Director: Kiyoshi Kurosawa
Japanese with English Subtitles
Although this mystery thriller starts out with the investigation into a
series of grisly murders in Tokyo, the question in this film is not who did
it, but why. The different and unlikely killers are connected only by a
disoriented drifter with no apparent memory of the hypnotic effect he has on
people. The detective -- played by the Koji Yakusho who was in the film
Shall We Dance -- along with his psychiatrist sidekick and distressed wife
-- must find out what evil influence has transformed these ordinary people
into killers. This compelling film is the first North American release for
director Kurosawa, whose major theme is the "malleability of personalities
in the aftermath of extraordinary events." Kurosawa's approach to this hot
topic is cool and distant, until he gets into the film's most effective
element, the presentation of simultaneous realities of the unbalanced mind.
The film earned Yakusho a Best Actor award from the Tokyo International Film
Festival.

April 12-18
Fat Girl
Director: Catherine Breillat
French with English Subtitles
Fat Girl is a story about sisterhood and sexual discovery between two
sisters: the 12-year-old Anaiis, overweight and morose, and the beautiful,
svelte 15-year old Elena, who is ready to experiment with sex. The two are
vacationing in a summer resort when Elena attracts the attention of one of
the local boys. Anaiis, who is eager for her own sexual experience, looks on
with smoldering jealousy, although she has no idea what such an encounter
would entail. As in her previous film entitled Romance, Breillat again
proves that she is willing to break taboos in the service of a story, in
this case to create a raw portrait of female virginity under siege that has
the blunt ring of truth. The film won "Best Film" at the Chicago
International Film Festival, and was nominated for "Best Foreign Language
Film" by the 2002 Online Film Critics Society.

April 19-25
Waking Life
Director: Richard Linklater
USA
With its curiously realistic animation and dialogue that seems more like
eavesdropping than a written script, Waking Life is as exhilarating in its
visuals as in its ideas. The director ("Slackers", "Dazed and Confused")
created a new type of animation by tracing over actual live-action images, a
new technique that helped earn the film "Best Experimental Film" and "Best
Animated Film" awards in 2001. Featuring such voices and animated likenesses
as Wiley Wiggins, Ethan Hawke, and Steven Soderbergh, the film tells the
story of a young man who has returned to the town where years ago a
playmate's folding paper toy unfolded to show him the words, "dream is
destiny." He seems to be in a dream, complaining that although he knows it
is a dream he cannot awaken as he wanders from one person and place to
another, reacting to the theories, beliefs, sanity, and nuttiness he
encounters. He is overwhelmed as people offer their views on everything from
existentialism to relationships, until he finally realizes that the answer
is curiosity itself, and that to not ask questions is a crime against one's
own mind.