SDAFF 2010: Award Winning Movies On The Way...

Hello 2010 SDAFF Fans, my name is Eric Lallana and I am one of the festival programmers this year. What a great opening four days to open up the festival. Some of you may think the festival slows down and goes into cruise mode. Actually, that's not the case at all because we still have some "Award Winning" films that have yet to be shown at this year's festival. Here are three films I recommend that are showing this week.

The first is a personal favorite of mine titled The Red Chapel. A documentary by filmmaker Mads Brugger. He embarks on an experiment by enlisting the help of two Korean born Danish comedians for a cultural exchange with North Korea under the pretext as a performing comedy troupe. As the camera chronicles Mads experiment results in a wide range of emotions that even for me are sometimes hard to explain to fellow moviegoers. My best advice is to just see it. The Red Chapel was awarded the prize for "Best Documetary" in the World Cinema category at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. A movie experience you will never forget.

The Red Chapel plays on Monday (10/25) at 8:00pm and again on Thursday (10/28) at 7:45pm.

Next up is Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, the winnner of the Palm d'Or, the top prize at this year's Cannes Festival. This great cinematic accomplishment from Thailand is by the country's best known filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul. The central story centers around Boonmee's last days spent at his sister's remote country home. Thanks to Apichatpong's deliberate pacing and attention to detail, we experience the cultural beliefs from the Thai perspective surrounding death.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives plays once on Tuesday (10/26) at 9:20pm.

Finally, also arriving from the Sundance Film Festival is The Taqwacores. The first feature length film by Eyad Zahra inspired by Michael Muhammad Knight's book of the same name. Taqwacores refers to the Islamic concept to love and fear for Allah and Hardcore, the punk rock subgenre. Eyad's movie centers around Yusef, a Pakistani-American engineering student who lives off campus with a diverse group of Muslims in their house in Buffalo all the while experiencing their world of the punk rock scene and comfort level on performing Friday prayer.

The Taqwacores plays once on Tuesday (10/26) at 7:40pm.