Wellness. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Jake Mahaffy.

Sita Sings the Blues. 2008. USA. Written, directed, and animated by Nina Paley.

Sita Sings the Blues. 2008. USA. Written, directed, and animated by Nina Paley.

Meadowlark. 2008. USA. Directed by Taylor Greeson.

The New Year Parade. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Tom Quinn.

Meadowlark. 2008. USA. Directed by Taylor Greeson.

Meadowlark. 2008. USA. Directed by Taylor Greeson.

The New Year Parade. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Tom Quinn.

Sita Sings the Blues. 2008. USA. Written, directed, and animated by Nina Paley.

Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53 Street
212-708-9400
New York
The Roy and Niuta Titus
1 and 2 lobbies
The Roy and Niuta Titus
1 and 2 theaters
Best Film Not Playing
at a Theater Near You
November 20–24, 2008

The third edition of Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You is an exhibition of the five films nominated for the “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” award. The winner will be announced on December 2 at IFP’s Eighteenth Annual Gotham Independent Film Awards. This exhibition of screenings at MoMA is a collaboration between the Museum’s Department of Film and the nonprofit organization of independent filmmakers, IFP, and its quarterly publication Filmmaker Magazine. Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You screens in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters at MoMA from November 20–24, 2008, and is organized by Joshua Siegel, Associate Curator, Department of Film, The Museum of Modern Art; Michelle Byrd, Executive Director, IFP; Scott Macaulay, Editor, Filmmaker magazine; and Milton Tabbot, Senior Director, Programming, IFP.

All of the nominated films are American independents made in 2008 that have been screened at film festivals yet have not been distributed theatrically. They were selected by members of the Filmmaker editorial staff and by MoMA’s Joshua Siegel. Among the nominees are three narrative films that blur distinctions between fiction and documentary through vérité techniques, using improvisation with non-professional actors, handheld cameras, home movie footage, and gritty location shoots. These include Tom Quinn’s The New Year Parade, about a South Philadelphia working-class family torn apart by divorce; Antonio Campos’s Afterschool, a disturbing study of violence and voyeurism at a New England prep school; and Jake Mahaffy’s Wellness, the tragic and quintessentially American portrait of a door-to-door salesman who unwittingly participates in a pyramid scheme. Also featured is Nina Paley’s delightful animated musical Sita Sings the Blues, in which the filmmaker interweaves the epic saga of ancient Indian lovers with her own romantic travails. The fifth nominee, Taylor Greeson’s Meadowlark, is a haunting autobiographical documentary in which the filmmaker’s adolescent experiences of first love and family tragedy become entwined.

Past nominees have included such favorites as Goran Dukic’s Wristcutters: A Love Story, So Yong Kim’s In Between Days, and Ronald Bronstein’s Frownland — all of which went on to receive theatrical runs, and critical and popular success, after being screened at MoMA in this series. While several of the films nominated for 2008 and presented at MoMA have received acclaim in their own right — Wellness was winner of the narrative Grand Jury award at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival, The New Year Parade won the 2008 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize and Sita Sings the Blues won Best Feature at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival — all are in need of theatrical distribution. The screenings will be introduced by their directors, and followed by a Q&A. A special Modern Mondays event November 24 at MoMA brings together the filmmakers of all five films for a panel discussion with clips.

SCREENING SCHEDULE
Thursday, November 20
6 p.m. Sita Sings the Blues. 2008. USA. Written, directed, and animated by Nina Paley. Filmmaker Paley was inspired to make the transition from comic strips to animation after traveling to India and discovering the Ramayana, an ancient Sanskrit epic about the star-crossed love between Prince Rama and his wife Sita. Recognizing echoes of her own romantic travails in this timeless Indian story, Paley has created a marvelously inventive, charming, and poignant animated
musical — winner of the Best Feature award at the prestigious Annecy Animation Festival — using a spirited chorus of Indonesian shadow puppets, the torch songs of 1920s jazz singer Annette Hanshaw, and dazzling animation techniques that recall everything from Lotte Reininger’s silhouettes and Busby Berkeley dance routines to Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop, Mughal miniature painting, and the fifties design of the UPA animation studio. 82 min. T2.

8 p.m. Wellness. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Jake Mahaffy. With Jeff Clark, Paul Mahaffy. The diminishing world of the door-to-door salesman, an American archetype, becomes a poetic meditation on spiritual crisis in Mahaffy’s astonishing feature Wellness, winner of the narrative Grand Jury award at the 2008 South by Southwest Film Festival. Jeff Clark, the star of Mahaffy’s debut film War, gives a performance filled with pathos and quiet desperation as he travels the wintry Northeast hawking a product line of dubious health supplements, only to become aware, slowly and tragically, of his own complicity in a crooked pyramid scheme. 90 min. T2.

Friday, November 21
6 p.m. The New Year Parade. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Tom Quinn. With Greg Lyons, Jennifer-Lynn Welsh, Andrew Conway. Winner of the 2008 Slamdance Grand Jury Prize, Tom Quinn’s intimate debut feature, about a blue-collar Philadelphia family on the verge of collapse, is so powerful and raw that you almost forget it’s a work of fiction — a testament to Quinn’s use of improvisation with non-professional actors, vérité-style filmmaking techniques, and location photography in the working-class neighborhoods of south Philadelphia. The film centers on two siblings who, witnessing the painful disintegration of their parents’ marriage, struggle to build meaningful relationships with friends and lovers. 85 min. T2.

8:15 Afterschool. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Antonio Campos. With Ezra Miller, Jeremy White, Emory Cohen. Twenty-five-year-old filmmaker Campos’s feature film debut is the haunting portrait of a student at an elite New England prep school who, preoccupied with surfing the internet for porn and violent imagery, inadvertently videotapes the fatal drug overdose of the school’s popular “It” girls. As parents and teachers stage a ritualized period of mourning, the
student becomes increasingly withdrawn and dissociated from reality. Campos mixes beautifully composed 35mm widescreen shots with grainy DV and internet-based video (the inspirations of Bruno Dumont and Michael Haneke can be felt throughout) to offer a chilling foray into the disturbed, and disturbing, world of a media-obsessed teenager. 106 min. T2.

Saturday, November 22
3 p.m. Sita Sings the Blues. 2008. See Thursday, November 20, 6:00. T2.

6 p.m. Wellness. 2008. See Thursday, November 20, 8:00. T2.

8:15 p.m. Meadowlark. 2008. USA. Directed by Taylor Greeson. "When I was twelve years old, my brother was murdered, I lost my virginity to a 20-year-old man, and I was ordained with the priesthood in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints." So begins Meadowlark, Taylor Greeson's quietly devastating self-portrait, in which the filmmaker tries to make sense of those twinned experiences of first love and tragic loss. Greeson weaves together footage shot in his native Montana and in New Mexico with home movies, taped phone conversations, newspaper clippings, forensics, and testimonials by family members, investigative officials, and even the murderer himself to create an autobiographical documentary that is at once mysterious, haunting, and full of grace. 77 min. T2.

Sunday, November 23
1:30 p.m. The New Year Parade. 2008. See Friday, November 21, 6:00. T2.

3:45 p.m. Meadowlark. 2008. See Saturday, November 22, 8:15. T2.

5:30 p.m. Afterschool. 2008. See Friday, November 21, 8:15. T2.

Monday, November 24
7 p.m. Modern Mondays: “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You”
Nominee Panel, Theater 3, mezzanine, Education and Research Center, 4 West 54 Street. The five nominees for this year's “Best Film Not Playing at a Theater Near You” Award gather for a panel discussion illustrated with film clips. Program 90 min.

Afterschool. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Antonio Campos

Wellness. 2008. USA. Written and directed by Jake Mahaffy.