7th annual brooklyn international film festival at theater2k.com

biff notes

The 8th Annual Brooklyn International Film Festival will be held June 3-12, 2005
at the Brooklyn Museum

06.14.04: The 7th Annual Brooklyn International Film Festival closed Sunday night at the gorgeously-refurbished Brooklyn Museum of Art having offered yet another typically eclectic and truly international cinematic buffet of the sad, the serious, the wild, the amusing, the what-the-hell-were-they-thinking and the just plain weird.

Particularly outstanding were a pair of documentaries chronicling the desperate and often deadly flight of illegal immigrants.

Mother's Crossing a Belgian entry directed by Lode Desmet followed an Iranian woman and her two young daughters as they fled her abusive husband across Turkey and into Greece. Desmet's film went on to capture BIFF's award for Best Documentary this year.

Mojados: Through the Night by 26-year-old Texas filmmaker Tommy Davis tracked a group of young Mexicans on a harrowing, ill-fated journey into El Norte.

For the complete list of 2004 award-winning films, visit BIFF online.

For cinema that was both keenly relevant and intensely dramatic, Israel's Behind Enemy Lines was tough to beat.

Director Dov Gil-Har's camera followed two men, a Palestinian journalist and an Israeli police commander, over four days in and around ever-volatile Jerusalem.

The men had become friends while participating in Gil-Har's earlier "Sleeping with the Enemy," about a give-peace-a-chance-type Israeli/Palestinian retreat in Japan in November, 1999.

But now they were both back home, and the September, 2000 intifada has claimed thousands of Palestinian and Israeli lives. In this reunion, "Enemy" viscerally portrayed a friendship nearly ripped apart by ideological differences, but perhaps ultimately made stronger because of the intensely heated debate and dialogue.

One of the standouts from the myriad short experimental and animation offerings was Homeland, by New Haven's Jacob Bricca.

In but five swift minutes, Bricca built a powerful visual montage, blending American consumerism with American war and fusing the two through TV news and TV marketing into just another big, attractively-packaged product to be sold to a passively accepting American public that exists seemingly only to consume and expand more.

And for weirdness? Mike Nicholls' Everything Taboo grabbed the inside track from what we saw. More affectionate scrapbook of what Boy George termed this "family of freaks" than linear narrative, "Taboo" went backstage and inside for all the bitchy banter one could hope for from the show that tore it up over in London's Soho and totally tanked here in the Apple.

Must have been Rosie O'Donnell.

(When you comin' back, Leigh Bowery ...)

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