Past Masters

il ritorno: Vittorio De Seta's Almost a Man.

No new genius, but a rediscovery at the Tribeca Film Festival.

by Sam Adams

"Unwieldy," "sprawling," "daunting." Maybe the Tribeca Film Festival is as big as they say. A lineup of more than 250 features, not to mention ID badges that would give Flavor Flav neck cramps, speak to a preoccupation with size, but in its fourth year, the lower-lower-Manhattan festival served up scores of orphaned films that audiences had no trouble finding. If the highlight of my jam-packed weekend and two midweek days was a slate of 50-year-old documentaries, the new films I saw were all worthwhile, often intriguing and sometimes remarkable.

By chance, I happened to see three of the top award winners — the Chinese melodrama Stolen Life, the colorful Chilean Play and the talky Dutch/Hungarian doc El Perro Negro: Stories from the Spanish Civil War — and walked out on all of them, looking for gold instead of brass. Walkouts are a fact of film festival life, since something promising is always playing next door, and were made necessary by frequent delays. Festival Director Peter Scarlet's introductions were a nice touch (especially compared to the generic intros at this year's Philadelphia Film Festival), but one screening was delayed a half-hour for Scarlet's arrival, at which point the personal touch starts to seem like a dispensable luxury.

The jury, whose roster included Sheryl Crow and Damon Dash, fared better with its special mentions: the Italian black comedy My Brother's Summer and the chilling documentary The Devil's Miner. The former, directed by Pietro Reggiani, begins as a playful trip inside an only child's imagination and evolves into a surprisingly compelling exploration of Catholic guilt, as the child's wishes for his baby-brother-to-be are tragically realized. Kief Davidson and Richard Ladkani's doc is the story of a 14-year-old Bolivian boy who works in the silver mines of Cerro Rico, aptly known as "the mountain that eats men." When you've witnessed the almost unbearable sight of a small child climbing through a narrow rock chimney or navigating an underground tunnel whose intense heat fogs the camera lens, it's not hard to understand why the miners pray to the devil as well as god.

Among the festival's other documentaries, the most talked-about (and immediately overhyped) was The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis' provocative parallel history of American neoconservatism and Islamic militancy. Nightmares overreaches, and Curtis' conspiracy theories would be more compelling if he laid off the smirking music cues. (Donovan and the mujahedeen?) But the film remains a must-see, if only for the evidence that Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney conspired to exaggerate the strength of a foreign foe in order to quell moderates within their own party — during the Nixon administration. Those who don't believe that they repeated the process in Iraq and are doing the same with the judiciary's "war on faith" are directed to www.informationclearinghouse.info, where a postage-stamp-sized Nightmares awaits.

Feature-wise, some much-hyped titles disappointed: Ilya Khrzhanovsky's 4 begins as a postmodern puzzle box then devolves into sub-Kusturica fantasia, while Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped, an adaptation of James Toback's Fingers, is a well-mounted production of basically adolescent material, although twitchy Romain Duris almost pulls it off. A self-conscious memoir from Waking Life cloudhead Caveh Zahedi, I Am a Sex Addict would have packed houses on title alone, but its confessional honesty is tainted by a failure to admit other points of view.

A more optimistic cousin to A Midwinter Night's Dream (among a handful of PFF/Tribeca crossovers), Pjer Zalica's Days and Hours passes a lazy night on a hilltop over Sarajevo, where grief and normality are both slow to emerge. Giddi Dar's Ushpizin may have come in under the radar, but its tale of life in Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox community is surprisingly effective. Shuli Rand, an Israeli star who renounced acting for Orthodox life, plays a newly religious ex-thug whose faith is tested by a visit from two rock-headed ex-pals. The schematic script soars largely on the conviction of Rand's performance; the quiver in his body as he prays for a miracle conveys a faith that fills every pore.

People go to film festivals looking for the next big thing, but the head-and-shoulders standout was a two-part tribute to Italian filmmaker Vittorio De Seta, hosted by a garrulous Martin Scorsese. Salvo Cuccia's documentary profile, Détour de Seta, set the stage, but nothing could prepare the audience for a reel of seven 10-minute De Seta docs whose command and audacity instantly established him as a forgotten master. Shot in Sicily between 1954 and '58, the films combine stark shots of peasants, fishermen and villagers with bold, even aggressive natural sound. The steam escaping from a volcano in Island of Fire or the thrash of wheat in Golden Arc becomes a harsh refrain split by deafening silence. Skipping De Seta's neorealist first feature Bandits of Orgosolo, which Scorsese revealed was Jack Nicholson's source for the script of Ride in the Whirlwind, the tribute resumed with the 1966 psychodrama Almost a Man. Inspired by De Seta's own analysis, the film's departure from realism is stark; one Détour subject recalls its reception as "a betrayal." But the vertiginous high angles of De Seta's documentaries remain, as does the startling imagery: a man's foot, pierced by a spear gun; black patches that threaten to blot out the sun. The protagonist's emotional numbness makes a strange contrast with the documentaries' sensual immediacy, but as De Seta explained after the screening, "Sometimes the inability to feel is due to an excess of feeling."