On a rainy Friday afternoon, I managed to spend some time with Israeli filmmaker Nati Baratz. We met at Manhattan’s Film Forum, where his film, Unmistaken Child, began it’s U.S. theatrical tour last Wednesday and will be playing there through Tuesday, June 16^th. Clutching an umbrella that flopped in and out which he offered me as a canopy repeatedly, he and I chatted about his career, his film, and the current state of documentary cinema.

The film is his first theatrical venture. A graduate of Tel Aviv University’s film program, Mr. Baratz made two documentaries for television, but as he tells it, he was a hired gun on those projects, taking them on in an effort to keep his chops up. Unmistaken Child follows the buddhist monk Tenzin Zopa on his search for the reincarnation of his late master, Geshe Lama Konchong. For more specifics, you can read the candler blog’s review, but you would do better to just go see the film.

We began to discuss the positive critical reception of his film, though Mr. Baratz was quick to point out that not all viewers are pleased with his work. ” Some people want me to give answers, to give explanations, like more conventional documetaries. This is fair enough, but it’s not the film I made.“He’s right. Unmistaken Child features only sparse interviews with the main subject, Mr. Zopa, and a handful of overlayed text, giving the viewer the bare minimum of literal context. “People want me to criticize things, to go deeper. Most don’t even realize how much information there actually is in the piece, because I made this for Westerners, not Buddhists.” Read on…

The candler blog is based in New York City and is still in it’s first year, so when I went to the airport to buy my ticket to the French Riviera but could only hand them the lint in my pockets, I was rebuffed and sent back to my Manhattan abode. So yeah, I’m not at Cannes reporting on the biggest film news in the world, but we certainly can get some work done at a safe distance, no? Let’s gather some of the noise and make a little story about it. With me? Here goes…

Last week, the latest film from the ineffable Lars Von Trier, Antichrist, screened at the 62^nd Cannes Film Festival, apparently causing the international film community to synchronously blush and squirm on the edge their seats. The internets are aflutter with talk about how great/sexy/violent/evil/awful/awesome the movie is. Is anyone surprised that Mr. Von Trier is once again a polarizing figure in cinema? What were you expecting?

An original member of the Scandinavian Dogme 95 collective, Lars Von Trier is one of the group’s most illustrious ex-pats. He made a real impact in the U.S. with his video musical Dancer in the Dark, starring Björk and Catherine Deneuve. After recieving  flack for making a film critiquing North American lifestyles (Dancer takes place in Canada) without ever having visited the continent, the director responded defiantly with Dogville, a grandiose experiment set in 1930s America. For some reason, every time you come close to pinpointing exactly what kind of filmmaker Mr. Von Trier is, he eludes you, sidestepping any label and making something completely unexpected.

I don’t want to talk about his newest film or the headier work mentioned above. I want to talk about Lars Von Trier, the unabashed trickster. Read on…