Trenton Film Society to present worldly films
By Anthony Stoeckert
THE Trenton Film Society is continuing its season with its 2014 International Film Festival, April 4-6 at the Mill Hill Playhouse in Trenton.
Curated by Jed Rapfogel, film programmer with Anthology Film Archives, a repertory cinema and film archive in New York City, the festival will showcase seven films from throughout the world.
The films to be screened are We Are The Best, a 2013 film from Sweden; Suzanne from France; We Are Mari Pepa from Mexico; The Sunshine Boys from South Korea; Death Metal Angola from the United States; Ida from Poland; and A World Not Ours from Lebanon.
”The festival selection was based on research, rather than submissions,” Mr. Rapfogel says. “As the film programmer at Anthology and an editor at ‘Cineaste,’ I have a pretty good sense of which new films are garnering attention at international film festivals.”
He adds that the festival reflects the Anthology’s mission to showcase films released by small distributors, and some films that aren’t even distributed in the United States at all. It’s a perfect fit since much of his work involves attending film festivals — he answered questions for this story as he returned from the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival in Greece.
He says film buffs will see movies that reflect a diversity of cultures, genre, tone and style.
”There’s everything from a Swedish high-school punk film and a melancholy South Korean buddy comedy, to a deeply personal documentary about a Palestinian refugee camp and a black-and-white period film from Poland about the hidden scars of WWII,” he says. “What the films all share is a deeply compassionate concern with their characters, a commitment to honestly depicting the worlds they inhabit, and, not least, a masterful command of filmmaking. Though they’re all vibrant, inventive, and deeply compelling, they’re not escapist films — they’re deeply engaged in the world, and hopefully the festival’s audiences will come out feeling both entertained and enriched.
Mr. Rapfogel says he watched several dozen films during the selection process, and that’s in addition to what he watches for his job with Anthology.
When asked to name a few highlights, he says that’s tough but he does come up with an answer.
”I would definitely make a special case for ‘A World Not Ours,’ a documentary about a Palestinian refugee community in Lebanon, made by a filmmaker who grew up partly in the camp (before emigrating with his family to Denmark),” he says. “It’s one of the most powerful, revealing, and intimate films I’ve ever seen about life in a refugee camp, made by a filmmaker with both the experience and insight of an insider and the broad perspective of one who escaped the dead-end fate of most of the camp’s residents. And as genuinely tragic as it is, it’s anything but earnest or heavy — it’s witty, inventive, and highly entertaining.
He calls We Are the Best a “major crowd-pleaser,” about three young girls who start a punk band in 1980s Sweden. “It has an energy and a deep affection for its characters that make it pretty irresistible,” Mr. Rapfogel says. “But really, I love all of my children equally…”
The Mill Hill Playhouse is located at Front and Montgomery streets in Trenton. For more information, go to
www.trentonfilmsociety.org