■ The Wind Will Carry Us
In Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s acclaimed 1999 film (out on Blu-ray), a Teheran television crew finds its way to a remote village to film local funeral rites. But the dying woman won’t die and the crew lingers on in a place where everything moves slowly. Sly references are made to rural poverty and the position of women, but the heart of the film is its close observation of everyday life, staged as if in real time.
■ Love in the City (L’Amore in Città)
The 1953 L’Amore in Città was conceived as a “magazine” on celluloid rather than paper—a set of six cinematic “articles” on the subject of love in Rome. Much of it was shot in the quasi-documentary fashion of Italian neo-realism using real settings and non-actors to investigate everything from streetwalkers to single motherhood and dancing with strangers. The best segment, Federico Fellini’s “Marriage Agency,” cleverly satirizes an analog precursor to today’s online match services.
■ GMO OMG
Fatherhood made filmmaker Jeremy Seifert (Dive!) think about the environment surrounding his children—a toxic world where the latent agents of cancer lurk everywhere. He especially wondered about genetically modified organisms, those artificially altered seeds forced onto many farmers by agribusiness conglomerates. “All natural ice cream?” Not if the feed for the milk cows comes from genetically modified seeds. The documentary’s whimsical title summarizes the entertaining spirit with which Seifert examines his serious object.
