IFFBoston celebrates 10 years of its Fall Focus series

by Sean Burns

Independent Film Festival Boston program director Nancy Campbell and executive director Brian Tamm knew they wanted to do something big for the tenth annual IFFBoston Fall Focus. The autumn offshoot of their spring shindig started in 2015 as a five-screening sneak peek of upcoming awards contenders and favorites from the international film festival circuit, but has since stretched out into a mini-festival of its own, offering area viewers early looks at future classics like “Lady Bird,” “Roma” and “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

So, how big did they go? They’ve managed to fit 14 movies into the festival’s five days, running from Thursday, Oct. 31 through Sunday, Nov. 3 at the Brattle Theatre, before moving over to the Somerville Theatre on Monday, Nov. 4 for a special 70mm screening of all 26 reels and 300 lbs. of “The Brutalist.”

Literally the most massive movie of the year, “Vox Lux” director Brady Corbet’s mid-century historical drama runs 215 minutes with an intermission. Starring Adrien Brody and Felicity Jones as Holocaust survivors who immigrate to America in 1947, the rhapsodically reviewed film was shot in VistaVision, an old-school widescreen process favored by Alfred Hitchcock that Cecil B. DeMille used for “The Ten Commandments.” Critics have thrown around comparisons to “The Godfather Part II” and “There Will Be Blood,” while Campbell calls it “an old-fashioned epic that people are going to be talking about for a long time.”

There aren’t many cities that will get to see “The Brutalist” this way. Tamm stresses that the screening couldn’t have happened here without the Somerville Theatre, which has made 70mm capability a permanent fixture of its projection booth. “Other theaters bring in rented 70mm equipment once in a while to show a Nolan or Tarantino film,” Tamm explained, but such large-format presentations are part of the regular programming at the Somerville. (Indeed, the theater will present the Boston area premiere of a newly struck 70mm print of Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” — also shot in VistaVision — during the weekend that IFFBoston’s Fall Focus unspools at the Brattle.)

On a much smaller scale, but perhaps more precious, is “Eephus” (Nov. 1), a film my friends are already sick of hearing me rave about. Cinematographer and former Harvard Film Archive employee Carson Lund makes his directorial debut with this wonderfully unassuming and sneakily profound sports comedy about two adult Sunday league baseball teams in Massachusetts playing one last game before their local field is bulldozed to make way for a new school. Set on a fall day in the 1990s, the film’s rhythms are uniquely attuned to the languid, inherent melancholy of America’s pastime, especially when the past-their-prime players are all out of shape and a little drunk.

Featuring very funny cameos by Red Sox royalty Bill “Spaceman” Lee and Joe Castiglione, the movie is something of a masterclass in repressed New England masculinity. The only way these men know how to express emotion is by busting each other’s chops, as they’re all trying to hang on to a world that’s already passed them by. It’s like Tsai Ming-liang’s “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” crossed with Artie Lange’s “Beer League.” One of the players asks, “Is there anything more beautiful than the sun setting on a fat man stealing second base?” In “Eephus,” the sun feels like it’s setting on an entire way of life. (Director Lund and several local cast members will be at the Brattle for a Q&A after the screening.)

It's not easy choosing a film to kick off a festival that begins on Halloween. Tamm says they wanted to begin the festival with an argument, starting things off with Marielle Heller’s controversial adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel “Nightbitch” (Oct. 31) which stars Amy Adams as a stay-at-home mom whose day-to-day stresses might be turning her into a dog. Campbell claims she chose the movie for Halloween night not because it’s a horror film per se, but “because motherhood is the most terrifying thing I can think of.”

The rest of the fest is a typically eclectic mix of genres that includes everything from the Latvian animated adventure “Flow” (Nov. 3), an ecological parable following a courageous cat, to “Devo” (Nov. 1), a documentary from “American Movie” director Chris Smith about Mark Mothersbaugh’s band of deconstructionist rockers. More adventurous viewers won’t want to miss “It’s Not Me” (Oct. 31), a so-called self-portrait by “Holy Motors” and “Annette” director Leos Carax that’s an autobiographical homage to the late-period collage films of Jean-Luc Godard.

The IFFBoston crew sounds most excited about “Gaucho Gaucho” (Nov. 3), which Campbell calls one of the most beautifully photographed documentaries she’s ever seen. Directors Michael Dweck and Gregory Kershaw’s follow-up to “The Truffle Hunters” is a black-and-white chronicle of Argentinian cowboys living off the grid. “It might be the hidden gem of the festival,” says Tamm. “We were both mesmerized by this movie at Sundance and one of the nicest things about what we do is being able to discover a film like this and share it with an audience we know will appreciate it.”

In 2018, Natalie Portman brought writer-director Rungano Nyoni’s rousing, riotous “I Am Not a Witch” to the Brattle when she curated a film sidebar for that year’s Boston Calling festival. Nyoni’s eagerly awaited sophomore effort, “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl” (Nov. 2), is an even more powerful fusion of the personal and political. The film follows a Zambian family’s funeral preparations after their eccentric uncle drops dead one night in front of a brothel. As the movie wears on, we begin to figure out that Uncle Fred wasn’t exactly the guy everyone’s making him out to be, and Nyoni irreverently segues into righteous questions of accountability and a historical record that has long turned a deaf ear to the voices of women.

Also recommended is Andrea Arnold’s messy, beguiling “Bird” (Nov. 2), which takes a magic realist brush to the filmmaker’s usual hardscrabble, underclass canvas. The film follows a 12-year-old girl — newcomer Nykiya Adams — left to her own devices by an inattentive dad played by “Saltburn” star Barry Keoghan, who isn’t much more than a kid himself. She befriends a gawky stranger (Franz Rogowski, best known as the bad boyfriend from “Passages”) whose avian affectations might have something to do with why he can’t seem to locate his long lost parents. After a wobbly start, this one really grew on me.

British cinema legend Mike Leigh brought his “Happy-Go-Lucky” to IFFBoston in 2008 for one of the festival’s most memorable Q&As. The 81-year-old icon unfortunately won’t be accompanying his new movie, “Hard Truths” (Nov. 3). Still, it’s one of Leigh’s most caustically funny films, reuniting the “Secrets & Lies” director with star Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays a hilariously fulminating rage case ill-equipped to handle the inconveniences of the modern world. Whereas “Happy-Go-Lucky” explored the psychology of optimism, “Hard Truths” plays like its inverted B-side, getting to know the angriest lady in the world — or at least the angriest lady in the parking lot.

It’s become a Sundance tradition that every year a film premieres to rapturous acclaim while I sit frowning with my arms folded. People seem to really love “A Real Pain” (Nov. 3) directed by Jesse Eisenberg, in which he and Kieran Culkin star as semi-estranged cousins ironing out their dysfunctional family differences while on a tour of Polish concentration camps. Culkin’s character suffers from an unspecified mood disorder that comes off more like an acting class exercise, and I personally found their buddy comedy antics juxtaposed with the Shoah and sensitive Chopin music icky and ill-considered at best. (I’ve been referring to the film all year as “‘Sideways’ Goes to Buchenwald.”) One can’t help but be reminded of the line in “Casablanca” when Humphrey Bogart explains to Ingrid Bergman that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in the shadow of World War II. This movie is the hill of beans.

I’m looking forward to checking out “Nickel Boys” (Nov. 3). This adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel marks the narrative feature debut of documentarian RaMell Ross, whose “Hale County This Morning, This Evening” announced a radical new approach to narrative. The fraught politics of the moment would also seem to demand seeing “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” (Nov. 2), a thriller shot secretly in Tehran that so enraged the Iranian regime that writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof was sentenced to a flogging and eight years in prison for making it. He’s currently hiding out somewhere in Germany.

“You should come see it,” says Tamm, “and then think about that when you vote.”

IFFBoston’s Fall Focus runs from Thursday, Oct. 31 through Monday, Nov. 4.