When the fest includes a documentary about film, it typically programs it so you can catch it as the very first of one's public screenings. I've learned to always do this when possible. The doc itself may or may not be a hard act to follow, but it reminds you of films that are. It's hard to think of a more perfect cinematic appetizer than this starter for the 40th anniversary festival. Release the films!
Hitchcock / Truffaut [US, Kent Jones, 4] Audio from the original interviews, clips galore, and observations from today's top directors provide a documentary extension of what is arguably the most influential film book of all time, Francois Truffaut's collection of conversations with Alfred Hitchcock. If you don't want Hitchcock and Scorsese and Fincher and Linklater et al to illuminate more to you about storytelling in than you can absorb in a single sitting, I'm not sure we really know each other after all.
I found this not just informative and absorbing but incredibly moving. Probably this tells you more about where I'm at at this moment in my life especially regarding, art and mortality and what we leave behind, than it does about the film. Or maybe everyone who's genuflected for a lifetime in the cathedral of cinema will feel the same. In which case maybe it's not a 4 but a 5.
And man I need to rewatch Vertigo again soon. And Psycho. And The Birds, and...
I Promise You Anarchy [Mexico, Julio Hernández Cordón, 3] Gay skatepunks in careless love ramp up their black market blood donor network for Mexico City narcos. Social realist crime story with slice-of-life pacing.
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