Brooklyn Underground Film Festival Fires Up at the Lyceum
The Brooklyn Underground Film Festival commenced its fourth year last night at the Brooklyn Lyceum, where a near-packed house dropped in for an opening night party and stuck around for Adán Aliaga’s documentary My Grandmother’s House (right). Having endured the close-ups of anti-fungal pedicures yet appreciated the film’s rambunctious poignancy, I caught up with program director Josh Koury to see what else he had up his sleeve for 2006.
“We have a great variety of work,” Koury told me. “The beauty of our program is that we have a little bit of everything for everybody. We have touching films that are more personal, we have very comedic films that are heavy and funny, and we have outlandish films and films that are very political and very timely. That’s the importance of this festival, I think: hitting all those those little buttons and attracting all those different crowds.”
So what specific “little buttons” do the BUFF organizers have in mind? Try Tally Abecassis’s taxidermy doc Lifelike, or the surreal Japanese clip show Super Happy Fun Monkey Bash, or Zipora Trope’s requiem for a dead Israeli punk rocker, Looking For the Lost Voice. Then there are the shorts–66 of them, including a quasi-tribute to Kirsten Dunst and a block of 11 student films.
And then there are the parties, most notably Friday night’s Meet the Filmmakers dance extravaganza and Saturday night’s music showcase featuring Har Mar Superstar and Five O’Clock Heroes among others. “I think that film festivals are almost always half-party and half-festival, but we really marry those two quite well,” Koury said. “I mean, we’re an underground film festival. We attract great people. We can throw a great party but also represent when it comes to film. And that’s important.”
Tonight, the Lyceum hosts the documentaries Clever Monkey Pinochet Versus La Moneda’s Pigs (a series of vignettes retelling the atmosphere around Pinochet’s 1973 Chilean coup) and Letters From the Other Side, while the “Lost and Found” shorts program boasts Talmage Cooley’sd brilliant blind-street-gang chronicle Dimmer. Phillipe Diaz’s The Empire in Africa closes BUFF Sunday evening–just a few nights before another well-known local fest’s shadow overtakes the city.
“You’re always fighting the big festivals like Tribeca and all the other ones around,” Koury told me. “But the idea that we’re our own entity, we’re all in one space, we’re all here together and it’s a community–I think that’s the real backbone of this festival. When you come here, you feel that. Nothing against other festivals, but you miss it, you miss more than just what’s on the screen–you miss something special. And I think that tonight was a perfect example of that.”
I met Josh Koury, the programmer at the festival and he was one of the nicest people I have ever met!!!! I just want to say thank you to him and all the staff at the BUFF for being so awesome.
Sonia