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Asoka the Great

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ABANDONED
Hungary, 2001. Director: Arpad Sopsits
Sat., June 1, 6:30 p.m., Harvard Exit
Sun., June 2, 9:30 p.m., Broadway Perf. Hall

You've seen one bleak, depressing, Dickensian orphanage movie, you've seen them all. Even though Abandoned is a powerful, well-wrought, autobiographical tale of a miserable Cold War boyhood in 1960 Hungary, it's the same damn movie you've sat through countless times before. Our hero is beaten, abused, and victimized. He cowers, flees, and weeps. He makes friends and enemies, feels the faint inklings of sex, glimpses a naked woman, and steals his first kiss (with a boy, it should be noted). In short, despite his horrid circumstances, 9-year-old Aron gradually comes of age. Abandoned is so heavy-handed in its pathos that it begins with an inscription from Nietzsche—"Woe to those who have no home"—and gets even darker from there. Flashbacks to his mother (blind? dead?) periodically torment the young lad who, with his fellow orphan inmates, collectively symbolize a parentless nation suffering under brutal, illegitimate communist rule. Brian Miller

ABC AFRICA
Iran, 2001. Director: Abbas Kiarostami
Fri., May 24, 4:30 p.m., Broadway Perf. Hall
Sun., May 26, 11:30 a.m., Pacific Place

So green, so red, so fertile—how is it that Uganda has been the seat of so much suffering? What went wrong? Long after the exile of Idi Amin, master Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami takes a fact-finding visit to the unhappy equatorial African country and produces this impressionistic video diary. The resulting documentary is both characteristically cryptic and deeply compelling. By and large, Ugandans speak for themselves in lilting English (with subtitles), describing a horrific epidemic of AIDS-caused deaths and the resulting 1.6 million orphans among a population of 22 million. It's an incredibly powerful, disturbing film, although Kiarostami doesn't help his cause by resorting to CARE-level images of saucer-eyed children and essentialist sequences in which orphans dance and sing to inscrutably joyous rhythms. An altruistic Austrian couple's adoption of one adorable little girl provides a somewhat hopeful coda to Africa, but as Kiarostami himself dryly intones, "Our only good fortune is that we humans can adapt to anything." Some consolation. B.R.M.

*AFGHAN ALPHABET
Iran, 2001. Director: Moshen Makhmalbaf
Sun., June 2, 6:30 p.m., Broadway Perf. Hall
Wed., June 5, 4:30 p.m., Broadway Perf. Hall

"A-B," the children repeat, again and again. These are the first two letters of the Afghan alphabet, and, not so coincidentally, they also sound out as the word for "water." In his new documentary, Makhmalbaf (Kandahar) elegantly points out the connection between the two: education and the source of life. Leaving Kandahar, Makhmalbaf journeys to the border of Iran and Afghanistan to examine the educational crisis of young Afghan refugees. Urgently shot on digital video during the U.S. campaign, this poetic film captures impromptu classes taking place out in the open—as well as those children eager to learn but left on the sidelines because they lack official identification papers. Makhmalbaf is most interested, however, in one nervous girl who refuses to remove her burqa in class for fear of retribution, even though she is out of Taliban hands. Although she cannot see the lesson through her head covering, it feels better to be blind than condemned. Anthony Kaufman

AGITATOR
Japan, 2001. Director: Miike Takashi
Fri., June 7, 9:30 p.m., Pacific Place
Sun., June 9, 4:00 p.m., Pacific Place

Agitator may firmly belong to the Japanese yakuza genre, but it clearly took most of its cues from the Don of all organized crime films: The Godfather. Here we have rival crime families, violence begetting more violence, a kidnapping of a rival advisor, a similarly lengthy runtime, and even some tarantella music. Yet Miikes Corleone-like saga doesnt offer any surprises either thematically or visually, and Agitator loses steam long before its finish. If theres a significant difference in approach at work, its the recasting of the protagonist as action hero. Here, its not so much the family that you dont want to go against, but the squinting bad-ass who absolutely refuses to compromise his loyaltiesor to employ any of the buttons on his shirt. Those familiar with Miikes previous work may be a bit surprised by his restraint (excluding a very unsettling rape scene). Theres plenty of blood, but he skips the guts. U.S. premiere. Paul Fontana

*ALL ABOUT LILY CHOU-CHOU
Japan, 2001. Director: Shunji Iwai
Thurs., June 6, 9:30 p.m., Pacific Place
Wed., June 12, 1:00 p.m., Cinerama

Shot on film and DV and drenched in shimmering color, Lily plunges the audience into the excesses of contemporary Japanese pop culture—its state-of-the-art gadgetry, its obsession with money and status, its speed-of-lightning shifts in trends, its worship of celebrity—in order to guide us through the treacherous paths of modern adolescence. No other "youth culture" film in recent memory has been as harrowing, draining, or truthful. At the story's center is 14-year-old Yuichi, a sensitive boy with a crush on the most popular and talented girl at his school. To escape the pressure of both hormones and middle-school savagery, he retreats into worship of the vaguely goth pop singer Lily Chou-Chou. Lily's rabidly devoted fans commune via chat rooms, where they dissect the world, offer solace to their wounded brethren, and pay tribute to their tortured goddess. Scored to both Debussy and haunting Japanese pop, Lily's emotional undertow swells until it threatens to engulf the viewer. Ernest Hardy