The House of Sand

Tonight's premiere of hot-button blockbuster United 93 has already spilled more ink across media pages than any other Tribeca title, so to temporarily escape Hollywood, let's fly our jets to Brazil. In director Andrucha Waddington's cross-generational saga The House of Sand (no fog in this one), a grizzled paterfamilias leads his people to the desert plains of northern Maranhao in 1910. After the convoy scatters and the prosperous dream dies with its visionary, only his wife Áurea (Fernanda Torres) and her mother Dona Maria (Torres' real-life madre, Fernanda Montenegro) remain in a home sweet wasteland of oppressive heat and boredom. Their emotions are as raw and extreme as the conditions; Áurea is enraged when she wants to escape and horny when she befriends a reticent native or a lieutenant passing through. Like sands through their frequently buried cabin, these are the days of their lives. Anchored by casual allusions to outside news, wars and technologies the women may never know, this quietly seductive elegy sweeps through the next six decades with a seamless sense of topographical texture and spatial editing. In effect, it's literally a new breed of Hiroshi Teshigahara's desert-isolation classic, as Áurea gives birth to a girl who will grow up a third-generation Woman in the Dunes. By the time their roles are reversed in 1942, with Montenegro now playing the aging mama and Torres her untamed daughter Maria, fest attendees should feel thankful they're not watching this gorgeous tapestry unfurl on a tiny TV screen.

Brasilia 18%

PREVIOUS UPDATE Update #1: April 24, 2006 Featuring Too Tough to Die, Rock the Bells, and Brothers of the Head. NEXT UPDATE Update #3: April 26, 2006 Featuring Ontic Antics Starring Laurel and Hardy, Lunacy, and The Case of the Grinning Cat.

77-year-old filmmaker Nelson Pereira dos Santos (How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman) helped pioneer Cinema Novo in the '60s, a quasi-documentary film movement that artfully surveyed Brazil's socio-economic plight. If you're unfamiliar with his previous work and subtextual ambitions, you might be confused to why the director's new Brasilia 18% feels like a blockbuster thriller without the suspense. When a high-profile medical examiner (Carlos Alberto Riccelli) is summoned to the titular capital from Los Angeles, his job of identifying a possible congressional aide's corpse gets him tangled in a dicey political scandal. Further addling his judgment, the good doctor is haunted by the nude specters of both his dead wife and the beautiful homicide victim he's autopsying, the latter of whom he may be having an improbable affair with. Government corruption, money laundering, rape, blackmail, underage prostitutes and the murder of witnesses are all on this film's agenda, though the criminal element isn't for meaty storytelling as much as polemicizing the current state of erosion in this foreign culture. A technically proficient, perfectly likeable film that might have been made past its prime (or its septuagenarian filmmaker's), Brasilia 18% doesn't quite subvert genre tropes enough to resonate with those unaffected by the country's problematic policies.

Barren Lives (Vidas Secas)

If you really want to catch Pereira dos Santos at the height of his filmmaking powers, check out the new print of his stunning 1963 near-masterpiece Barren Lives (Vidas Secas). The aforementioned Cinema Novo was heavily inspired by the Italian neo-realists, and this seminal film of the movement is as naturalistic and heartwrenchingly earnest as any Vittorio De Sica weepie. Stylized in black-and-white so starkly overexposed and high contrast that the actors can look like charcoal sketches on a canvas of white sand, the film charts the daily survival and coping of a poor transient family in 1940. Starving and tragically accepting of their fate under the existing social system, the cattle rancher's wife spots vultures circling in the distance and indifferently laments, "There ain't much here." Obsessively daydreaming of leather bed luxury, she nabs and cooks her two sons' pet parrot before we ever learn its name, and their dog Baleia better watch his tail. Father, out trying to make his pittance, is harassed by the taxman on the streets and an armed enforcer who cheats and jails him—but just as the country's impoverished did—the clan somehow perseveres. Comparisons to that same year's The Grapes of Wrath aren't without merit, though the one-step-forward, two-steps-back hardship faced here is a greater depression requiring more patience to reap its bold rewards. The delicate, diegetic score further unlocks viewer empathy, though you'd probably need a heart of stone to not get a few tears jerked by this powerfully emotive portrait.