7pm
Road (Leslie McCleave, US, 92 min., Beta SP, 2005)
* * Director Leslie McCleave present * *
Winner – Outstanding Performances for Catherine Kellner and Ebon Moss-Bachrach – Los Angelos Film Festival 2005
Two ex-lovers set out on a road trip when Margaret, a freelance photographer, gets her first big assignment to survey environmental clean-up sites. Joined by Jay, her unemployed ex-boyfriend, they travel into a landscape filled with one abandoned environmental disaster after another, while painful memories of their troubled relationship begin to emerge. Suddenly, back roads lead to nowhere, equipment fails, and Margaret and Jay inexplicably encounter the same foreboding characters again and again. The couple circles through what looks and feels like a hell on earth as they try to navigate the roads between toxic waste sites and damaged love. With its stylized narrative, compelling performances, and supernatural backdrop, Road brings us to the heart of a disturbing social issue in an evocative story for our times.
9pm ** FREE **
Police Beat (Robinson Devor, US, in Eng. & Wolof w/ Eng. St., 80 mins., 35mm, 2005)
Police Beat presents a unique protagonist in the post-9/11 world: a morally upright, Republican Muslim police officer. The film follows African-born Seattle bicycle cop, Z on his beat for seven days and six nights, covering crimes, all of which are based on actual Seattle police reports. Z is so preoccupied with his possibly unfaithful girlfriend that he never once acknowledges the criminal world that swirls around him. The crimes Z encounters become mirrors of his turbulent inner state, allowing him to philosophize about his unstable romantic relationship as well as his own development as an emotional being. While Z's regular interactions are in English, his thoughts, narrating the film, are in his native Wolof, the primary language of West Africa. Police Beat is an unusual portrait of an immigrant new to the United States that focuses less on the protagonist's socioeconomic difficulties than on his emotional responses to American life.
